Posts by The Man Who Fell To Earth

Trump sends the US Navy back to the steam age

1954

The first steam catapult was put on a US aircraft carrier in 1954, because propeller fighters didn't use them. Trump's next EO is to mandate the US Navy go back to propeller fighters.

Cisco thinks Mythos means instant death for unsupported networking kit

Re: Cisco thinks Mythos means instant rewards for writing insecure code

I'm confused as to why the hardware needs to be replaced when it contains flawed firmware. Isn't that like telling you to replace the car when you get a flat tire?

‘Humans will be a rounding error on the internet’ says Cloudflare exec

Re: It is time

So if humans using the Internet become a rounding error, does that mean our Internet access becomes free?

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

Re: Ah great

Then make them perscription medical devices without recording capability.

Amazon Leo constellation nears 400 satellites as broadband launch looms

Competition

I've been a Starlink customer in rural Vermont for years. The low-speed (100Mbps) residential rate of $40/mo just went to $55/mo. (100Mbps is fine for my needs.) Satellite ISP services are a universal commodity, unlike land-based ISP services, as satellite isn't limited geographically. (Where I am, my only land-based option is 1.5 Mbps over copper DSL from the land-line phone company. There is no cell service.) So the bottom line is, satellite providers should compete on price unless they illegally collude to price-fix.

A modest proposal: Reformat everything to make documents more palatable to AI

Re: How about No

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsNQTfZj4o8

Zuck defends monitoring employees to win AI race in purported leaked audio

Meta Employees

Meta employees are stupid employees' idea of smart employees.

Microsoft researchers find AI models and agents can't handle long-running tasks

Cumulative Error

So apparently the AI folks "forgot" about the most fundamental aspects of computation?

Taiwan cops say student's radio kit brought bullet trains to a standstill

OK, I'll bite

So how did they come to focus on Lin?

GoDaddy customer claims registrar transferred 27-year-old domain without any security checks

Re: Schitzo

The fact that both the folks whose domain was given away by GoDaddy & the person who received the domain from GoDaddy have the same story, backed up by the receiver proactively contacting the original domain holder in an effort to give the domain back, should tell GoDaddy security that their verification & logging about documentation is inadequate, including it seems the lack of a human name in the logs associated with the transfer*. If GoDaddy's security staff doesn't get that, they should be fired for incompetence.

*"Gilder said that GoDaddy staff most likely looked at the signature and mistakenly transferred its parent domain to Susan rather than the intended one."

Microsoft's GitHub shifts to metered AI billing amid cost crisis

Re: The Old Shell Game

Ed Zitron has been predicting this bait & switch for a while.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/ais-economics-dont-make-sense/

Vintage chatbot lives in the past like an elderly relative

Originalism

They should make a model trained only on data through 1787 and then ask it how far off the Originalists on the US Supreme Court are.

Opsec oopsie: Dutch navy frigate location outed by mailing it a Bluetooth tracker

OK, I'll bite

Why don't they screen the mail before they take it to the ship?

Microsoft cuts cloudy desktop prices by 20 percent, warns they’ll wake up slowly

Re: A serendipitous MS business decision - for some?

What are you, a commie? How dare you even think your data & what you do belongs to you! Think of the larva children!

And the subscription revenue.

RAF eyes cheap drone-killer as Typhoon jet tests laser-guided rockets

Failure

It's pretty obvious that after all these years and billion of dollars, directed energy weapons don't cut it. Probably because they can't direct enough energy fast enough to compete with a bullet or chunk of shrapnel in terms of damaging the target sufficiently to prevent it from completing it's mission.

AWS CEO: It's funny when people ask me if AI is overhyped

Re: 70 percent of audience members had raised their hands.

I'd have thought the added value of getting one's employer to shell out $4k for attending is the employer paying for ones networking to jump to one's next job. AI musical chairs is an industry unto its own. Or so I heard from a friend.

Welsh government used Copilot for review to justify closing organization

unnamed organizations

"...based on 28 interviews with people from unnamed organizations..."

So prove they are not hallucinations.

Brit lawmaker targeted by AI deepfake fails to get answers from US Big Tech

Re: "Social" networks thrive on misinformation...

Is there anything real on Reels? I doubt it.

Re: Priorities

Time to hold these companies financially accountable just like "regular" companies. LA was a good start.

AI still doesn't work very well, businesses are faking it, and a reckoning is coming

Re: bring it on

AI is a stupid person's idea of a clever bot.

Water company wasted $200k on bad answers from an AI model – so built its own slop filtering system

Idiots

They could have hired people with actual expertise. The fact that they raised money without anyone onboard with relevant technical expertise says their VC's are even dumber than the founders. They all deserve to lose their shirts.

Everything needed to make DNA and RNA found in asteroid sample

Re: So life is older than Earth

Yes, but this, taken at face value, implies the comet express water could have contained these nucleic acids.

AI nonsense finds new home as Meta acquires Moltbook

Virtual Masterbation

AI's jerking off other AI's on a Social Network. Isn't it great what we allocate gigawatts towards? Useless virtual motion whose only purpose is to give pleasure to virtual entities.

Microsoft 365 confirms new premium tier, stuffed with AI and few discounts

AI

I was just going to say that. Kind of like paying more for organic food for it having no AI (Artificial Ingredients).

'AI brain fry' affects employees managing too many agents

Makes sense

Anyone whose been in management, has been a project leader or simply been part of a starup when it's under a dozen, knows there's a limit to how many direct reports one can have before things are guaranteed to go south. Before the direct report count reaches that, smart people create some type of oranizational structure so the team can grow without everyone reporting directly to that team leader. Substituting AI for meatbags wouldn't change that, although the maximum workable direct report number with all humans is well above three. But maybe wrangling AI's is more like herding cats or little kids....

Firefox 149 beta develops a split personality

They need to fix their profile bug

The business of a profile not being readable if modified by a later version, especially a version only one minor revision away, is a fundamental architectural bug. The config file parser should just ignore an entry if it does not recognize it. (Treat it like a comment.) The user should not have to jump through hoops to roll back a minor revision.

Moon's mighty magnetic field was a 5,000-year titanium blip

Re: Was the titanium in

A better question is why titanium? Titanium & it's alloys are generally paramagnetic. Naturally occurring titanium oxides are also not magnetic or are diamagnetic.

Rogue devs of sideloaded Android apps beg for freedom from Google’s verification regime

Re: Total Identity Ecosystem

It's formost about money, secondarily about control. Nothing more.

Gemini lies to user about health info, says it wanted to make him feel better

Gemini is just following Google's motto as best an hallucinating AI can.

Don't be evil.

Why does the Windows 11 taskbar hurt me like that?

Microsoft is not your friend

And pretty much everything about Windows 11 & Office 365 proves it.

The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware

Re: Sales argument

Except you can't.

I have to have both Teams and Zoom on my PC simply because I have to go to meetings with organizations that schedule virtual meetings conducted using one or the other. Granted, I use the free versions of those tools, but I couldn't do my job without both being on my PC.

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.