* Posts by Eponymous Bastard

175 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Feb 2011

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Marks & Spencer admits cybercrooks made off with customer info

Eponymous Bastard
FAIL

Sparks, not so bright

I wonder what this calamity tells us about Marks and Spencers' recruitment and training values?

Do they employ people who will click on any link in an email?

Do they employ a company to simulate phishing attacks to help to prevent this kind of clusterfuck?

The email I received today from Jayne Wall was poorly written; perhaps AI was avoided or perhaps Jayne is another poorly educated Oxbridge PPE graduate.

I expect some Sparks offers soon . . .

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

Eponymous Bastard

Turn it all off

Why is there not an option to turn off all the shit one doesn't want in Word?

It's irritating to have an American app suggest correct use of English, let alone its desire to correct my grammar.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

Eponymous Bastard

The BBC - least trustworthy news outlet . . . ever

The greendiots like Rowlatt and co will be soiling their kecks.

UK convicts five romance fraudsters who stole millions from duped singles

Eponymous Bastard

Punishment?

Their sentences will probably be pathetic in relation to the distress and hardship they have caused.

I would argue corporal punishment at least, and ideally capital. Scammers are worse than excrement.

London's poor 5G blamed on spectrum, investment, and timing of Huawei ban

Eponymous Bastard
Coat

Gee

I remember when I first got a 4g capable 'phone that I achieved a great signal and connection on Rough Tor, Bodmin Moor, but I didn't want to watch Netflix, Amazon Prime or YouTube there; go figure.

Was good for mapping though, which was nice.

Linus Torvalds forgot to release Linux 6.14 for a whole day

Eponymous Bastard
Meh

Forgetful/

Or stoned?

UK must pay cyber pros more than its Prime Minister, top civil servant says

Eponymous Bastard
Mushroom

Low bar

Well it won't take much to employ staff with a higher IQ than all of the eejits in Parliament over the last decade or so will it?

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

Eponymous Bastard
Mushroom

Zealots

But there's no point in trying to argue with the anthropogenic climate change zealots because they are the disciples of a new religion championed by people like Gates and the "World" organisations who persist in travelling around the world thumping their bibles.

The Maldives are yet to be inundated despite prophecies of doom from the 1990s.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

Eponymous Bastard

Mary Whitehouse reborn

. . . for the 21st century. Yawn.

Tim cooking up the dough as his Apple pay rises 18% to $74.6M

Eponymous Bastard

I know you hate wintel but . . .

Ok, so where I work we bought 35+ Mac Pros 6 years ago.

They were the wine cooler ones - remember them?

They produced vast amounts of heat even at rest which meant that at maximum performance they produced some quite impressive heat; the air handling system (lame) struggled to keep the temp in the main teaching area - university - below 23°c.

Those machines were retired in the summer of '23 because they couldn't run Sonoma, ergo they were not going to receive further security updates which means they're unusable.

These were replaced with M2 Studios.

USB connectivity has proved to be a nightmare with these; mice go awol. Epson Scanners won't function properly but then work ok when the USB cable is removed and reconnected. The mouse fails again. WTF?

Only x2 USB ports which with x2 Eizo displays are required for calibration - another testicular ache with Mac OS.

Meanwhile 6 year old Dell Alienware PCs still work and will upgrade to W11.

Go figure why people still pay a premium for Macs.

BTW our Mac guy is awesome.

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

Eponymous Bastard
Coat

Missing the point

I don't have children, but if I did, their surname would not be Bastard.

UK energy watchdog slaps down Capita's £130M smart meter splurge

Eponymous Bastard

3rd engineer visit . . .

I am awaiting a 3rd visit from an engineer in the last 15 months to get my dumbass meters talking to the fat controller . . .

Genius

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Eponymous Bastard

Rainman

because

Five Eyes infosec agencies list 2023's most exploited software flaws

Eponymous Bastard
Happy

Re: These would be great

Tom Browne would be my choice - a great voice, but I know what you're getting at!

Apple drops soldered storage for 2024 Mac Mini

Eponymous Bastard

Sympathy void

If you buy a Mac you either have too much money and no logic or you're even more stupid than you look.

Combustion engines grind Linus Torvalds' gears

Eponymous Bastard

In thrall

Western governments are in thrall to technocrats / dweebs who are selling them their big idea and it appears that Torvalds doesn't want to be excluded from this cabal.

I doubt any of them is an expert but most of them will tell you that "carbon is the enemy".

FFS they can't even tell the difference between soot and carbon dioxide, that "poison" that is plant food.

I'll get my Teflon® coat to protect me from all the excrement that the climate change muppets are gonna spray over me.

Musk, Bezos need just 90 minutes to match your lifetime carbon footprint, says Oxfam

Eponymous Bastard

Squeaky clean?

Oxfam overpaid staff never fly anywhere, ever, or use and ICE vehicles for travel anywhere ever of course.

But they're not hypocrites are they.

Eponymous Bastard

Re: punative world-wide taxes on billionares

You meant spelling : ) ?

Eponymous Bastard

What no Swift or Emma Thompson???

Read the title.

Fujitsu claims 634-gram 14-inch Core i7 laptop is world's lightest

Eponymous Bastard
Devil

Fujitsu?

In the UK it's not a brand that anyone with any connection with RM would want in their home.

UK ponders USB-C as common charging standard

Eponymous Bastard

. . . and all the old stuff . . .

. . . is useless and ends up in WEEE, which probably means it gets shipped to somewhere where child labour is used to de-solder / decommission it. We have store up years of shit by improving out tech have we not?

Eponymous Bastard
Devil

Re: "wall wart of fortune"

Yeah, the whole PD thing is less than transparent to people who think "it's just a USB C cable . . ." because they're not all equal and neither are the sockets viz the mac Studio with Thunderbolt on the rea and "standard" USB on the front; plus a lack of USB A which is still very popular.

Apple fixes bug that let VoiceOver shout your passwords

Eponymous Bastard
Go

Expletives?

A very convincing reason to include expletives in one's passwords IMO.

A look under the hood of the 3D-printed, Raspberry Pi powered 'suicide pod'

Eponymous Bastard

Zurich?

Isn't it cheaper to fly to Zurich?

Avis alerts nearly 300K car renters that crooks stole their info

Eponymous Bastard
Facepalm

Compensation?

Avis will be paying compensation to all those affected of course.

This uni thought it would be a good idea to do a phishing test with a fake Ebola scare

Eponymous Bastard

Re: Charity work

Minutes required, only minutes. The colleagues who complain are the usually the ones who can never get to work on time, but always manage to leave on time . . .

Eponymous Bastard
Coat

A benefit?

I'm told that when colleagues perform poorly at simulated phishing attacks sent via email they are subjected to further simulations until they shape up. Some staff complain that they get so many emails and that they're busy. We're all busy and some of us bother to concentrate or actually get in a few minutes earlier each day and have a bit of extra quiet time to attend to any email backlog.

What the moaners fail to appreciate is that they are more than likely being subjected to similar attacks via SMS, telephone calls and emails in their personal life and that if they learn to be a bit more savvy at work it might actually save them quite a few quid and an awful lot of nightmares. Their employer might survive too.

Coat required because autumn's come early in South West England . . .

Benign bug in iOS and iPadOS crashes gizmos with just four characters

Eponymous Bastard
Thumb Up

Well I never!

Stifling guffaws.

City council faces £216.5M loss over Oracle system debacle

Eponymous Bastard

Re: Easy Money for Oracle - same old BS gov't IT project

Possibly because the LGPS is nice; I know, I'm paying into one as a member of professional services staff at a University.

It is also possible that many local government employees were unable to find suitably well-remunerated employment in the private sector because they were fucking useless.

The secret to better weather forecasts may be a dash of AI

Eponymous Bastard

Modeling

When I saw that word you lost me. Coat required because the jet stream will flip again soon and Blighty will be colder than usual in July.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Eponymous Bastard

Anywhere but Europe . . .

Living anywhere but Europe seems more attractive day by day, especially if John Robson is resident.

Bill Gates says not to worry about AI gobbling up energy, tech will adapt

Eponymous Bastard
Alert

Trust

How, or why could anyone trust this dweeb?

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

Eponymous Bastard

Re: Just a thought

A là Monty Python & The Holy Grail - yes!

Eponymous Bastard

❤️

Please run for President!

Eponymous Bastard

Nanny, nanny, nanny!

Thanks for the link.

"Last year, Carl Kruger, a Democratic state senator from New York proposed a bill to ban the use of iPods and other electronic devices while crossing the street."

Carl, you are an immense waste of space.

Eponymous Bastard

Re: GOOD

Darwinism ROCKS!

Eponymous Bastard
Mushroom

Deaf

I wonder how deaf people manage.

If you walk around with noise cancelling ear buds / headphones in any environment then I think Darwinism will prove an effective solution to population growth but in particular if it targets the young, fertile and stupid.

I'm not sure I've even experienced the Swift noise yet and I have no interest in hearing it.

Raspberry Pi 5: Hot takes and cooler mistakes

Eponymous Bastard

Re: "...let me count the ways..."

All the skills required to be a politician then.

I think double-talk, dissembling, and equivocation is rather harsh.

Microsoft admits slim staff and broken automation contributed to Azure outage

Eponymous Bastard
Windows

"slim" staff?

Are they fat-shaming now at Redmond?

Larry Ellison a major contributor to Blair Institute vaccine database plan

Eponymous Bastard

Prick

To paraphrase the comedy genius that is Harry Enfield . . .

Blair, Ellison - look like pricks, sounds like pricks - must be pricks.

Could have substituted that with the initialisms There We Are Now, or Can't Understand New Technology.

These pricks deny democracy with their own brand of tyranny. Ironically Edward Heath was disparaging about οι πoλλοι having much of a clue about anything too but he was pretty wet.

My father, who was a member of the Goldfish Club courtesy of a little incident in August 1942 over the Mediterranean, used to opine that we would go "the same way as the Romans".

He was wrong; at least the Romans had fun whilst enjoying unparalleled decadence.

Modest Apple talks up these 'incredible' advances in iOS

Eponymous Bastard

Amazing

"Amazing" was the word uttered by the self-checkout supervisor at my local Tesco this week when I presented them with the receipt to prove that I had "actually" paid for a bottle of vodka which required the security cap to be removed to avoid the potential embarrassment of the store's security guard from apprehending me as I left the store and the alarm sounded.

I was like well relieved innit.

Logitech, iFixit to offer parts to stop folks binning their computer mouse

Eponymous Bastard
Happy

3D printable parts

As 3D printers become more advanced, reliable and easier to use it would be wonderful to think that more companies embrace the kind of thing that Edelkrone does with this

https://edelkrone.com/products/flextilt-head-3d

I expect there are other companies out there which offer download of stl files for printing but I've not come across any recently. Where I work a couple of us "design" replacement parts for things to keep them going. Things like battery covers, knobs and buttons etc. get broken or get lost and render equipment unusable without a little extruded piece of PLA!

Think of the great PR glow in which a company could bathe if it announced self-printable replacement parts.

I'll get my knitted trunks for a paddle.

Meta's Zuckerberg paid $27M in 'other' compensation for 2022

Eponymous Bastard
Coat

Philanthropy?

Well let's hope the little cunt dies happy / soon.

He could do so much good with that kind of wonga - maybe he does in a Smashie & Nicey kinda way mate . . .

Then again look at Gates. He had the potential to be a great philanthropist but all he does is buy / encourage / promote misinformed climate change mumbo jumbo clickbait opportunities with the main stream media cunts who will happily fellate the fuck out of him in exchange for his stinking $$$. No better than that prick Musk firing fucking rockets all over the shop, digging fucking tunnels, smoking dope; dickhead.

I'll get my coat because it's fucking cold again here on the peninsula, but that's just the weather innit.

Intel pours Raptor Lake chips into latest NUC Mini PC line

Eponymous Bastard
Thumb Up

Re: Digital signage? WTF?

Can vouch for that!

Running really old Raspberry Pi 2s - they take SD card - yeah full size SD cards. These have run plugged into a variety of TV screens scattered around the building and have done for many years. They're powered off the USB port in the back of the TV and boot when the TV is turned on and get shutdown brutally when the TV gets turned off. This "system" has proved remarkably resilient. I was running it via a published Google Slides show but opted for creating a LAMP on a Pi3 last year and using a nice little Wordpress slideshow. I found Chromium struggled on the old Pis as it became more bloated and sometimes Google Slides screwed me. The Pis still use Midori; and BTW they're on an internal network and run in a not-for-profit business so their security is pretty robust.

The whole exercise has been a great learning experience for me. A NUC would definitely be overkill for basic jpg slides IMO.

Microsoft promises it's made Teams less confusing and resource hungry

Eponymous Bastard
Flame

Teams fucks computers

During the shite era that was lockdown Teams fucked my previous Dell laptop. Every time I was forced into some hideous, pointless seemingly never ending "meeting" with colleagues and my former feckless line manager when the buzzword was "content" the poor machine suffered an asthma attack. My colleagues laughed every time as they could hear it struggling for breath. When it died I got a "newer" Dell which still hyperventilates when doing anything "collaborative" in Teams.

Teams is just another fucking tool to monitor our "performance".

Once upon a time there was just Outlook and endless streams of shite into which one was cc'd . . .

I'll get my aquascutum as it's wet here in the Duchy.

Gone in 120 seconds: Tesla Model 3 child's play for hackers

Eponymous Bastard
Coat

Disgruntled employee

= hacker's friend = joint winner?

I'll get my teflon outerwear.

GoDaddy joins the dots and realizes it's been under attack for three years

Eponymous Bastard
Trollface

Purple helmet

I'll get my coat.

Most Londoners would quit before they give up working from home

Eponymous Bastard
Devil

Sharing a space with ignorant selfish people

I wish I could work from home although I hated it during the fucking incarceration.

I share an office with a selfish cunt who speaks loudly to his wife on the 'phone almost every 30 minutes, and eats crisps with his mouth open.

Another eats stinky food at his desk, snorts phlegm and then coughs without covering his face and slurps every fucking drink.

I bought noise cancelling ear buds for work and enjoy Groove Salad but need stink cancelling nose buds.

I might have to retire early even though I'm only 60 and I won't get my state pension until 2029 . . . : (

BTW I am very aware of my own failings but I do buy coffee, biscuits and doughnuts for my colleagues because I can and hope that it somehow, maybe ameliorates my grumpiness.

I'll get my coat, the production of which produced absolutely 0% CO₂ of course.

EU infrastructure risk project to address potential climate, 'resource' shortage catastrophes

Eponymous Bastard

Ugh

The usual virtue signalling woke wank which the world media controlled by Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Musk twat, amongst countless other wealthy autocrats expect us to keep on believing.

I just hope the redemption is painful and slow when the ignorati realise they've been fooled and rebel; well one has to dream innit.

How to track equipped cars via exploitable e-ink platemaker

Eponymous Bastard
Devil

Hack it!

I'd love to be able to put SMUGCUNT on all the electric car plates whose drivers believe their selfless behaviour is going to save the planet for their spawn.

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