Posts by The Man Who Fell To Earth

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

Re: In other words

You mean its not realistic for Musk to launch 1000 satelites per week for 19 years to get his million? /s

AI security startup CEO posts a job. Deepfake candidate applies, inner turmoil ensues.

Re: Back to in-person application.

Agreed. The cost of flying even 2-3 short-list candidates in for an in-person interview, even from the other side of the planet, is such a tiny fraction of the annual salary you are going to pay the right person, that not doing it is negligence. Insurance companies should not pay for damage caused by a fake employee unless they were interviewed in-person.

Surrender as a service: Microsoft unlocks BitLocker for feds

Re: How can you not use an MS account in Windows these days?

I'd also suggest after you are done with the install, add O&O ShutUp10++ & have it turn off all the AI crap, Recall, and set it to "Recommended and somewhat recommended settings".

Lawmakers urge FTC to probe Trump Mobile over 'deceptive' marketing

Re: broken moral compass

Right 0.28% of the time?*

* 1/360

Over half of AI projects are shelved due to complex infrastructure

Re: So basically....

And yet you didn't name even one.

AWS flips switch on Euro cloud as customers fret about digital sovereignty

Re: Performative hyperscaling

Anyone who stores sensitive data in any cloud without locally encrypting it first so only the encrypted version is in the cloud deserves to have their data pilfered.

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Re: Mazda CX-5 track information

As near as I can tell, automotive software is written by people who have never been in a car, much less know how to drive one. And they start from scratch every year or so. My 1999 Lexus had better & less buggy navigation software and entertainment software than my 2025 Toyota.

Gmail preparing to drop POP3 mail fetching

Re: Thunderbird for the win

Same here. Own my own domain, which I control, own a bunch of email addresses that I control. Use Thunderbird for local archiving. As far as I can tell, iMAP exists for the sole purpose of making data mining easier for the likes of Google.

BTW, encrypted communication for POP3 is either requested after protocol initiation, using the STLS command, if supported, or by POP3S, which connects to the server using Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) on well-known TCP port number 995.

Your smart TV is watching you and nobody's stopping it

Smart TV Boxes are worse

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/01/the-kimwolf-botnet-is-stalking-your-local-network/#more-72836

Satellite radio transmissions are jamming telescopes and driving astronomers batty

Re: Military interference

Congress should pass a Law telling hydrogen & the other problematic elements to change their emission frequencies. /s

Military interference

One has to wonder if the out of band interference negatively affects military systems ability to detect stealthy targets, fast targets or tiny targets. Might be the bigger stick to beat operators with.

When the AI bubble pops, Nvidia becomes the most important software company overnight

Re: Follow the money

As far as the AI bubble goes, Nvidia is a trailing indicator, not a leading indicator. They are the flowerpot maker to the tulip craze. By the time you see the revenue drop from the GPU sales, the bubble has already burst.

British Airways fears a future where AI agents pick flights and brands get ghosted

Re: Oh no

AI is the ultimate dodgy sales trick.

Uncle Sam sues ex-Accenture manager over Army cloud security claims

Ok, I'll bite

What was her position that allowed her the ability to dig this grave?

Crypto-crasher Do Kwon jailed for 15 years over $40bn UST bust

Re: What's the over/under

No, he was prosecuted in the Federal Southern District of New York.

"United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, announced today that DO HYEONG KWON was sentenced to 15 years in prison for committing wire fraud and conspiring to commit securities fraud, commodities fraud, and wire fraud in connection with KWON’s fraud centered around Terraform Labs PTE, Ltd. (“Terraform”), and the cryptocurrencies launched by Terraform. KWON was extradited on December 31, 2024, and pled guilty in August 2025 before U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, who imposed today’s sentence."

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/crypto-enabled-fraudster-sentenced-orchestrating-40-billion-fraud <---- Note this is the Federal DOJ press release

Trump can pardon him. My bet is he will at some point. Just watch.

X shuts down European Commission ad account after €120M fine announcement

Re: Irony

Well, Elon has to protect free speech. Oh wait...

IBM touts progress on tech stack for AI-enabled airline with no passengers or alcohol

Re: What?

"There will be two kinds of people in the World. Those who tell computers what to do, and those who’re told by computers what to do." – Marc Andreesen

Everyone in Silicon Valley knows Andreesen is a pompous idiot. Everyone in Silicon Valley believes AI will eliminate the first category.

China's reusable rocket makes it to orbit but fails to stick the landing

Looks good, overall

I'd say the chances are good they'll have it all work on the 2nd or 3rd try. As Flocke Kroes points out, SpaceX took a number of tries before they got one to work at all phases.

CISA warns spyware crews are breaking into Signal and WhatsApp accounts

Re: Somebody tell the FCC

You are asking for a coherent coordinated response from an incoherent Administration?

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

Re: Or...

Will the self-destruct work if it's plugged into a USB charger? One would hope so, but if so, they should say so.

Firefox adds AI Window, users want AI wall to keep it out

Hey, Ajit!

How'd that Metaverse thing work out for you back at Meta? Looking like LLM's sold as "AI" is going the same way.

OpenAI’s viability called into question by reported inference spending with Microsoft

Check Kiting Accounting

Like everything else in AI.

Tablet market stalls because there’s not much new worth buying

Re: No Great Loss ... 100% Correct.

I refuse to paint on a tablet. Canvas is cheaper.

Microsoft's data sovereignty: Now with extra sovereignty!

Re: Risky business - any way you turn it

Anyone who stores data in any cloud anywhere without encryption independent of the cloud provider is a fool. Cryptomator or equivalent where the data is locally encrypted before storage in the cloud is the only way, or just say no to cloud storage.

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: Thumbs up

While not quite what Plummer wants, adding O&O ShutUp10++ & Open Shell is a partial step towards addressing his complaints.

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/releases/tag/v4.4.196

Foxconn hires humanoid robots to make servers at Nvidia's Texas factory

Re: The death of humanity

Where have you been the last 20 years? The entired business model of high-tech is based on the overwhelming majority of humanity being dumb as posts who blindly do what computers tell them to do whether it's waste their lives playing video games, watching porn, watching social media or engaging in other real or intellectual masterbation all to expose themselves to ads for the computer to tell them to buy crap they have no use for.

Re: Marvin is working in a factory now !!!

More to the point, it's an Nvidia robot working in a contractor's factory making Nvidia products. So of course Nvidia is paying and driving it.

Re: the company will deploy the bots

That's the Bender model. Not out quite yet.

Google imagines out of this world AI - running on orbital datacenters

Skynet

What could possibly go wrong?

Amazon complains that Perplexity's agentic shopping bot is a terrible customer

"...degraded ... customer service experience it provides."

Amazon has "customer service"? Who knew?

YouTube's AI moderator pulls Windows 11 workaround videos, calls them dangerous

Re: I only use Windows for work

If Microsoft is going to eliminate supporting local accounts, that will force a lot of people and small businesses to not upgrade to the latest Win 11, if not leave Windows entirely.

Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware

Stress

Pretty clear why your boss was stressed. It was all stress he created for himself.

Agreed

Anyone with an ounce of common sense, even if new to any industry, would not delete a bunch of anything without knowing what it is, whether it is used regardless of documentation status, would back it up before doing anything, and would only disable it for some period of time (weeks/months) before removing it. Makes the rest of "Ted's" story suspicious.

Shield AI shows off not-at-all-terrifying autonomous VTOL combat drone

Re: AI-written PR slop?

Lunar landers for example, didn't use parachutes for any aspect of their landing. Some Mars & Venus landers used parachutes or airbags for aspects of aerobraking at altitude or landing, but most missions to those planets used retrorockets for touchdown.

Re: AI-written PR slop?

Especially when it has crap like "Vertical landing on a launch pad is simpler in CGI than reality, though SpaceX proved it's possible."

Just a few examples of spacecraft successfully vertically landing on ground by rocket engine, many before Elon was even born.

Luna 9 (1966)

Luna 13 (1966)

Luna 16 (1970)

Luna 17 (1970)

Luna 20 (1972)

Luna 21 (1973)

Luna 24 (1976)

Surveyor 1-7 (1966-1968)

Apollo 11-17 (1969-1972)

Viking 1 (1976)

Viking 2 (1976)

Mars Pathfinder (1996)

Spirit (2003)

Opportunity (2003)

Fake home invasion vid lands woman in real trouble

Re: So tell me sir...

Maryland is a no-fault divorce state and no longer allows fault-based grounds for divorce, such as adultery or cruelty. Couples can now pursue divorce based on one of three no-fault grounds: irreconcilable differences, mutual consent with a marital settlement agreement, or a continuous separation of at least six months.

AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists

Re: First world problem

If the results proved fatal, I'd suggest Darwin Awards might be in order.

SpaceX is behind schedule, so NASA will open Artemis III contract to competition

Blue Origin?

Have they even put anything in orbit? I guess they sort of did with NG-1, although the landing part failed.

Rocket Labs is probably the 2nd to SpaceX in launch pace for orbital insertions, but they're stuff is (so far) smaller than a falcon. And I don't think they've reused a booster yet. However in August 2023, they launched an Electron with a pre-flown Rutherford engine...

In '90s Microsoft, you either shipped code or shipped out

Stack Ranking

In my experience back in the 90's, stack ranking is for lazy executives who are insecure in their own judgement so basically behave like bullies. It still bothers me that I had to let some excellent people go because they had the misfortune of being on a team entirely composed of stellar people, but they were (by arbitrary criteria) the bottom 5%. Had they been on one of the less important teams where the average was lower, they'd have been ranked at or near the top. Stupid doesn't even begin to describe stacked ranking.

Thou shalt not let AI run amok: Vatican wants global rules

AI is 'above all else a tool.'

AI is above all else a tool, created by "Tools".

Meta convinces Blue Owl to cut $30B check for its Hyperion AI super cluster

No problem

If the AI thing doesn't work out, Meta can use it for that Metaverse thing of theirs. Oh, wait...

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Sounds like they were reckless

1. Unauthorized entry to the data center.

2. Removed equipment simply because they didn't know what it was. (Talk about hubris...)

3. They didn't document the equipment/cable configuration in any way before removing it.

4. Took down the company for several hours.

I learned at a very young age that even unpowered equipment can play an active role in a network. In my case, a long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the building I worked in had a defunct ADP alarm system installed by some prior tenant. If you unplugged its phone line, even though it was an unpowered box, it took down a chunk of the building's telephone system. A few years go by, and the telephone company was in the building doing work for another tenant, and I asked one of the telephone company techs about it. He went to the building's telephone cabinet, looked around, and unplugged an unlabeled phone cable from a small, unlabeled box. I didn't see him do anything else. After that, we could unplug that ADP box and toss it. Don't know & don't care why it did what it did, but never had an issue with the phones during the half dozen years after that I worked there.

Additional lesson - don't be afraid to ask another tech, especially if the unknown looks like it might be closer to their area of expertise. (In my case, telephone lines in the age of coax ethernet.)

Hacked Ford screens put anti-RTO slogan above CEO’s face

Having been in the room

At my last place when RTO was implemented, HR (as one presented option) had no assigned seating as the option if we wanted to increase attrition. Any place that is truely implementing RTO for teamwork assigns seats specifically with teams together.

California cops confused after trying to give ticket to self-driving car

Re: Layers of obfuscation are the American Way

Impound the robotaxi and send it to the crusher the same day. It's the only way to get the company's attention.

SIM city: Feds say 100,000-card farms could have killed cell towers in NYC

Re: Nation state actors??

Any way you slice it, real people had to

1. Rent the apartments.

2. Show up and physically put the SIM cards into the units.

3. Plug the units into the wall power.

4. Connect the units to that router in the middle of the group of units.

5. Plug that router into what looks like a 5G internet gateway.

So lots of opportunity to get folks on security cams, if nothing else. Also, lots of serial numbers to track down & supply chains to follow.

The Notepad that knew too much: Humble text editor gets unnecessary AI infusion

Re: Just do it

Yea, because Microsoft will conclude that there's PEBKAC malware on the loose.

Just do it

Disable Recall for all users:

Under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsAI" create (if need be) & set the DWORD "DisableAIDataAnalysis" key to 1

Under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsAI" create (if need be) & set the DWORD "AllowRecallEnablement" key to 0

Disable Copilot for all users:

Under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot" create (if need be) & set the DWORD "TurnOffWindowsCopilot" key to 1

Ruh-roh. DDR5 memory vulnerable to new Rowhammer attack

Re: Ah, the memories...

My recollection was it was mostly alpha decay from trace amounts of thorium in ceramic packaging. A large part of getting rid of the problem was simply the widespread adoption of plastic packaging.

Google unveils master plan for letting AI shop on your behalf

We've seen this before

The first part of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwk7p6hn9ts

Brussels faces privacy crossroads over encryption backdoors

Re: They work for us?

It has nothing to do with combating kiddie porn. That's just a smoke screen to distract the feeble-minded. It has everything to do with control of the citizenry.