Posts by ChrisBedford

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

This is why as an IT support drone I am unimpressed when (usually older) people tell me their kids / grandchildren "are very good with computers". I keep trying to explain to them that confidence does not equal competence but sadly when faced with such a wildly different different way of doing things from the way they did it at that age, "blasé" impresses the hell out of them. I always wonder if they would be as blown away by the same kid, with the same (i.e. zero) skills got behind the wheel of a Ferrari and just put their foot down, but you might as well talk to a brick wall...

Tech support chap hauled out to help SWAT team saw his life flash before his eyes

What, no shots fired?

Positively ho-hum.

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

"inspired by the Outlook web experience."

"The new Outlook for Windows, built upon modern service architecture, is inspired by the Outlook web experience."

Yeah. It really was. And if I wanted to use Outlook Web, I'D USE OUTLOOK WEB which is bloody awful but O Kin a pinch and/or for troubleshooting purposes. As a serious, business-oriented communication tool? F*&^%K no.

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

I just looked...

...and after god-knows-how-many years of using Chrome at its completely factory-standard settings (apart from cosmetic changes like default fonts) I have no "OptGuideOnDeviceModel" folder anywhere on two computers, one running Win10 and one Win11. Where is it supposed to be? (And yes, I switched "View" to display hidden and system files & folders for purposes of this search)

Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't

Re: The state of Utah may be surprised to discover

"They should also notice that there are long lists of other things it would be more appropriate for the legislators to be doing"

Ohhhhhh no no no no no no. No. Legislators' primary item on their "to do" list is "be seen to be doing something". Failing real achievable goals, the next best thing is making a lot of noise, and given the prevailing winds in "Red" states, it's probably most rewarding to make noises that fall along right-wing "christian" nationalist puritanism lines.

Re: The state of Utah may be surprised to discover

Couple of decades ago a whole bunch of US states (& maybe also the federal gummint) tried very hard and many times to shut down The Pirate Bay, a torrent hosting site in Scandiwegia. The TPB admins got very, very fed up with explaining to the FBI or whomever that US laws wen't applicable to them and eventually just posted instructions on where to insert their search warrants, on the FAQ on their home page. Didn't help of course.

To gain root access at this company, all an intruder had to do was ask nicely

Re: First of all

'care to give us their choice of phrase when they actually want to say the thing that "first of all" actually means'

In my mind the "of all" just adds emphasis to "first" - i.e. the whole phrase translates as "nothing else is anywhere near as important as this first thing", and that adding "of all" to all the subsequent items on the list is just stupid. Why would you need to keep stressing them?

Does this make me a grumpy boomer? DILLIGAF?

Having said which, I have always preferred Plain English in all communication, verbal or written, formal or casual. You can still get your point across, no matter how formal or technical you need to be, without adding flowery BS so "firstly" is my first, second, and third choice. After that I just shut up. And if you ever catch me saying "second of all" know that I've either had a stroke or am being heavily sarcastic.

Re: common sense needed

"if people got used to answering calls from random mobile numbers and discussing their banking details over the phone it would be a huge opportunity for scammers, he wasn't convinced"

The only surprising thing about this whole story is that there is an actual "bank manager" in the branch. In South Africa there is no longer any such person in any bank I've been to in the last decade plus. They have all sorts of euphemistically worded titles like Senior Customer Service Liaison Officer and such but no-one to actually take responsibility for anything that goes on there.

Lego throws its own Hail Mary

"If only it were a little cheaper"

Ha ha. That's been the response to everything from Lego since about 1975.

HP stuffed a PC into a keyboard. We took it for a spin

Re: Spills

Caption to the teardown photo: "The HP EliteBoard G1a is easy to repair"

Yah except maybe the keyboard itself, i.e. the most likely to get damaged and also the only component with moving parts and which gets used all day, every day. I wonder if there's a removeable replacement part like for notebooks, costing more than three times the price of an actual standalone keyboard including plastic case and BT electronics.

For sure as stated in the review, a solution in search of a problem. But having said that I'm sure they'll sell a bunch of them on the novelty value alone but I predict the product line will last maybe a few years then fizzle out. The first thing I noticed in the photo was that it appears to come only in the "compact" format - but compare sales of full-sized keyboards (with the inverted-T + additional 6 navigation keys)? Likely another factor that will contribute to a lukewarm reception.

Sticky-note security turned gym into hall of '80s horrors

"we have to imagine that Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" was first on the playlist"

Followed closely by Rick Astley "Never gonna give you up"?

Re: Gyms

"never seen the point [...] inside and sitting on a fake bicycle"

- weather

- predictable gradients

- dogs

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

It's not like it's the only hardware getting retired though

Sure, it sucks. But have you tried installing new apps on an old iPad? Sorry, this app requires iOS version {whatever} or later. In fact, you can't even open some websites any more, Safari's security isn't good enough.

Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

Happens all the time.

Monitors turned off because they have those stupid unmarked touch-sensitive controls on the front, right where your knuckles brush against the bezel while picking up a pen from the desk. Computers powered off because someone bumped the wall socket switch with a vacuum cleaner. Mice and keyboards unplugged / switched off inadvertently in a variety of ways. one of the most satisfying is desktop PCs with that little hardware switch on the back of the modular PSU right next to where the power cable plugs in, I long ago gave up counting how many times that was the problem. "But why was it switched off?!" - yeah, welll, ask the grandkids, old chap.

Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs

Utopia (Au, 2014) has entered the chat

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3163562/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_5_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_utopia

Re: They probably 'reach out' all the time as well

"In the 70s it was used by bicyclists"

I still is. It's a valid word in the non-business world, I think it's used for the rotational speed of your pedals which plays a massive part in your performance on a bike, not to mention how important the term is to musicians and voice artists. When the corporate BS artists adopt a term it poisons it for the rest of us.

Microsoft kicks new Outlook opt-out deadline down the road to 2027

Re: Office Outlook, W10 Outlook, "New" Outlook, outlook.com, Office 364½.......

"I would prefer a broken open source product to an intentionally broken-by-design malware ridden flaming mess from Microsoft"

I think this puts you in the minority. Quite a small minority, at that.

Re: Office Outlook, W10 Outlook, "New" Outlook, outlook.com, Office 364½.......

"the emphasis will eventually shift from a Microcrap world to a Google one"

You say that like it's a good thing! It sounds very much to me like a frying pan / fire situation.

Re: Anyone else remember the days...

"I don't believe it will go down well among customers"

Alas, I'm not so sure about that, at least amongst individual / private users. Outlook has become so entrenched, for most people it's the only UI they understand. The only viable alternatives I've found are eM Client (free version spies on usage and disables itself if it suspects you are using it for commercial purposes) and Thunderbird (opens everything in a new tab and some users just can't be taught to be aware of them - before long the whole computer grinds to a halt under the memory load of hundreds of open tabs; plus it has several menus that overlap in functionality but are accessed in completely different ways, AND THEY KEEP CHANGING THEM WORSE THAN MICROSOFT DO)

I'm 100% with you on all points raised and judging by the 50+ upvotes we're very much not alone. I'm also driven to swearing - a lot - mostly by the high-handed approach to rearranging the menus so damn often. I get the idea of "giving it a fresh look" every now and again (shopping centres do it, so...) but just moving shit around for the sake of it has pretty much been a Microsoft signature move since... well, the [Start] button in Windows 95, I guess, and it's... annoying. I wonder how those gibbons on meth would feel if we broke into their houses at night and rearranged not only all the furniture but the contents of their kitchen drawers and cupboards and anything else we can, just because we feel it would "look better" that way.

About the only significant interface improvement I've noticed in the Office suite in the last 15 years was putting the Insert / Remove page breaks menu item in Excel on the ribbon under "Layout" instead of several non-intuitive menu items deep. That's it. As I've said in response to that clingy and insecure survey about "Why did you revert to Classic", if I wanted to use the web version of Outlook I'D USE THE WEB VERSION OF OUTLOOK.

Which incidentally is one version you forgot to mention in the list of different Outlooks. And there's also the email service called outlook.com that it connects to. The frustration involved in the confusion of "same names for different products" alone is enough to make a grown man cry (the words left out of Jagger's Windows 95 promo theme song...)

Engineer held hostage by client who asked for the wrong fix

Re: Outrageous

It must be nice to fantasise like this.

Re: Outrageous

"legged it as the sprinklers started"

Of all the things that never happened, this never happened the hardest. Sprinklers can never start by any means other than actual heat. And if a data centre has halon, it doesn't even HAVE sprinklers.

Also, halon fatally highly toxic and discharging it for any reason other than an actual fire was punishable by some pretty severe laws - actual non-optional prison time, usually.

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

It's bad enough when users refer to the desktop / wallpaper as a "screen saver"

...but when IT professionals do it I want to beat them around the head with a mouse pad.

Banksy's Limitless limited by Windows Activation

Re: so

"Banksy didn't respond as its not their show. No one check that while writing the article?"

OK, except

"We asked the organizers of the exhibition what had befallen the screens"

Banksy didn't respond as he wasn't asked, as it happens. And, yes, as it also isn't his show and he already said that.

Bring back your old Mac: 5 ways to refresh the OS on elderly Apples

Re: Nice to See This Being Done... but

"Can you please add some examples of what you mean?"

Your whole post would be one. You enumerate enhancements ("not a massive upgrade"? Seriously? That would cost more than many new Windows PCs), which you did to make a Mac run the same speed it did when it came from the factory with 10.11 El Capitan.

I have seen definite slowdowns when updating from 13-14-15 but sure, small amounts that most users would get used to in a matter of a day or so. But that's due to the impressively powerful Apple silicon and little else.

To be clear, my criticism is not limited to Apple. Redmond is just as guilty - maybe more so - under the guise of "enhanced security" and "additional features" (addendum: "that no-one wanted") and there is also a limit to just how much memory or SSD you can add to improve the situation. Usually somewhat cheaper for the PC, though.

Just one PS: yes, sure, you have to have an MS account to start up Win11 the first time (there used to be a workaround until I think this year's 25H2 semi-annual Big Update but they eliminated it) *BUT* it's easy enough to remove that requirement once the machine is running. Just create a new (Admin capability) user - "I don't have this person's MS Account details" and then "Create a user without an MS account". Log out, log in with the new user, delete the MS-account user. *MAKE SURE TO EITHER DISABLE BITLOCKER OR BACK UP THE ENCRYPTION KEY*. I have one MS account I use for this purpose that has probably a hundred PCs "associated" with it as a result of using this technique. It's a bit tedious, sure, but it only takes a few minutes.

Re: Nice to See This Being Done... but

"They don't. One strongly suspects you just like shitting on Macs without ever having actually used one."

That's a deeply ignorant remark and makes you sound like the exact person you describe. My Mac-enabled customer base is a lot smaller than the Windows crowd, sure, but I run an old Mac myself and have tried to help a few customers with older (desktop and notebook) Apple machines to upgrade because _*their computers got slower with every MacOs upgrade.*_ When the hardware could take more memory or a new HDD I have done what I could (but of course the iMac that's glued together has to be done by the Mac agents because the replacement proprietary double-sided tape costs as much to import as 8 GB RAM and an SSD) and the computers are now much faster. Almost as fast as they were when new, running the version of MacOs they came from the factory with, in fact. Don't know how anyone can say that's not due to immense bloat.

Re: Nice to See This Being Done... but

"The yearly Mac OS updates don't really add a lot of groundbreaking features to the machines"

Not only that, they add *IMMENSE BLOAT* which slows the machine down. So it's all very well to go to all the trouble of hacking the newer versions to run on the old machines, but really, is it worth it? Adding RAM (where possible) and an SSD can only go so far, and then you are stuck with a computer that's really only suitable for pensioners who are patient and don't really mind it it takes 5 minutes to load a web page. Otherwise... shell out absolutely colossal amounts of money for a shiny new Mac that does all the same things the old one did, only with slightly different menus. Yayyyy.

You don't need Linux to run free and open source software

Only one note!

eM Client is good and I installed it a lot for my Little Old Lady clients, but a long way from FOSS. It has a free version, sure (it works unregistered for a month and you have to register it to the email address - they send you a free perpetual licence) but to "unlock" features you have to pay for it.

What features you ask? More than one email address, for one thing. So forget having your ISP-specific email and your Gmail address in the same place. And the other thing that horrified me was that when I set it up for a non-profit - a very charity-funded children's shelter - it worked for a few months and then, apparently after spying on the the email traffic for that time, decided this was "commercial use" and just stopped working, with a ransom "error message".

I switched them back to T-bird. Has some odd quirks like hard-to-find config / setting options (there are at least three separate places to access these different but overlapping menus - and when you google "how to" you'll probably find instructions that reference menus that have changed or moved) and it insists on opening every new window in its own tab. I find unsophisticated and elderly users just don't seem to be able to retain that information and keep opening more and more of them. And Thunderbird re-opens all those tabs next time you open it, without asking. Tedious. It also is set by default to "threaded" conversation view and most users hate this.

The air is hissing out of the overinflated AI balloon

Correction:

"And I bet many of you thought that customer service call centers would be one of the easiest things to switch to AI chatbots"

No, we thought that customer service call centers would be one of the first things to switch to AI chatbots.

And we knew it would contribute still further to the ever-downward-spiralling levels of customer service the world has experienced for the last three or four decades.

I just deleted my entire social media presence before visiting the US – and I'm a citizen

"...I will flash my US passport and smile. They'll let me in. Unless..."

... someone googles my name and discovers my social network accounts all end in a black hole, which will alert them to the obvious fact that the accounts have been deleted, at which point I will have been jailed, waterboarded, and disappeared to any one of a number of "detention" centres inside or outside the country.

Field support chap got married – which took down a mainframe

"If you're not customer facing, why bother dressing up?"

Yeahhh... in the 80s and 90s, some of the more uptight companies (in South Africa, anyway) still felt that "internal customers" should be afforded the "same respect" as actual customers, so ties were mandatory even if you never saw a single customer ever.

I remember going for an interview in the late 80s in uniform - I was serving in the Navy in an office job, and it was Summer so we were in Whites (not the ice cream suit, but white long trousers and open-necked short-sleeved shirt) and I just drove from the base to the job interview. Took criticism from one member of the panel for being "so casual". Yeah. OK, stick-up-your-arse, thanks for your time... in retrospect, so glad I didn't get that job. not sure if it was about the lack of tie / blazer / crimplene slacks (this was after all still the height of Saturday Night Fever outfits here) or my less than obsequious attitude, but I think I dodged a bullet there...

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

The mind fair boggles

Parts of that "report" display a fundamental lack of understanding of how software works in the 21st Century. "The fact that the department currently lacks visibility into the origins and security of software code hampers software security assurance" is an outdated attitude to OSS that has no place in 2025, let alone in a top-security department.

Just another example of deploying "the best people" (i.e. "have passed the Trump purity test") in the most important positions.

Trump fires NSA boss, deputy

Re: What did they really expect?

"absent in the US system because they copied our government with the difference being that you elect a king"

Indeed. Those naive Founding Fathers probably thought that by replacing the House of Lords with an Senate they were putting enough of a "check and balance" in place, but then they completely f^&*(ed up by arbitrarily allocating two senators per State irrespective of population - clearly a massively UNbalanced system

"He denied Loomer had anything to do with it."

So, she definitely did have everything to do with it then.

Tech support session saved files, but probably ended a marriage

Re: going passive-aggressive on a petty tyrant

"Oscilloscopes and computers went for more than their new value"

I went to one open PC / equipment auction, once, and never wasted my time again. The cartel of IT companies (probably with collusion of the autioneer) did their homework in advance and made sure to get everything of vaue before anyone else got a chance, and the uninformed public drove up the prices of the junk stuff the professionals didn't want.

There are 10,000 reasons to doubt Oracle Cloud's security breach denial

The problem is the actual victims here aren't Oracle

I used to be a customer of a DNS server service that Oracle bought out. Cancelled that account at least 8 years ago. I still receive updates from them warning about planned maintenance outages. I clicked the "unsubscribe" link, they kep on coming. I complained to "support", who gave me every assurance that my email had been removed from the databse. They kept on coming. I replied to the support email calling them liars, and they just stopped responding. It wouldn't surprise me at all if I was to find out they have blocked my email address for receiving.

And yet the emails keep on coming. Really tight internal IT department, this company. What's their business again? Oh, IT services? OK then.

DOGE geek with Treasury payment system access now quits amid racist tweet claims

"You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity"

Brave words from an incel.

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

If you are not useing OneDrive, go to Settings -> Apps -> Startup and switch OneDrive to OFF. This has worked for me to stop it from nagging to set it up.

While you are there you might like to look through the list and switch off other MS apps that have been set to start automatically whether you use them or not - Edge and Teams the most notable resource hogs among them.

So where are the settings?

Accurate article. But it would have been really nice if it had given a quick summary of the settings to switch it off in -Office- MS 365, Google, and - oh, yeah, well, who cares about Mac, amiright.

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

There's only one way to use AI

...you have to micro-analyse every word, graphic, chart, and table it produces, double-check facts, and just generally micro-manage it as if it was a 1st-month intern. In other words, you have to take more time over its output than you would have done producing it yourself.

The difference between an AI and an intern is that you have to keep doing that for as long as you keep using it - AI is never going to outgrow the 1st month stage, at least not in terms of trustworthiness. We've all seen the reports of ChatGPT and other bots Making Shit Up and arguing the toss over patently untrue statements - MAGA politcians, in other words - so there's really no point in ever going down that road, as far as I can see.

Thank god I'm old and will never have to work in a coporate environment where Copilot drives the dystopian nightmare. It's bad enough living in the dystopian political nightmare driven by China, Russia, and idiots like, well, the entire UK Conservative Party.

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Aah, the ambiguity of English

"Or, at the least, companies must come up with roadmaps for moving their existing codebases by January 1st, 2026."

They must come up with roadmaps by Jan '26? Or move the codebases by Jan '26?

Harvard duo hacks Meta Ray-Bans to dox strangers on sight in seconds

Clickbaity much?

Come on, this is beneath El Reg. No-one "hacked Meta Ray-Bans". They *USED* said specs - plus other resources - to look people up. That's not a "hack", at least not in the sense that the headline implies.

Under-fire Elon Musk urged to get a grip on X and reality – or resign

Re: 200m

"legacy media doesn't tell both sides of the story"? Really?

I don't know about the UK but look across the pond and you'll see the legacy media bending over backwards to give Trump's camp "equal time" by pretending he's not the most toxic thing to happen in that country since it was a country.

'Little weirdo' shoulder surfer teaches UK cabinet minister a lesson in cybersecurity

Use of weird English, El Reg?

Preumably they meant the mind boggles

"The mind baffles as to why[...]"

UK's Investigatory Powers Bill to become law despite tech world opposition

1984 is here, it's just taking a little longer than Orwell invisioned. "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—"... and so on. It's the end — no longer just the erosion — of privacy, and the irony here is that the Tories are the idealogical bedfellows of the GOP who TRUMPet personal freedom so loudly.

What really chilled me was not that end-to-end encryption might or might not be outlawed, but the casual way it's just nonchalantly mentioned in passing in the final sentence. Way to bury the lede, El Reg.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Re: I need classic outlook

"POP3 is horrible. It simply doesn't work in any situation where you need to access your mail from multiple devices"

Yes it is (horrible) but there are ways it does work with multiple devices (just tell your client software not to delete immediately on download)

The problem with IMAP or any other sync-with-the-server type protocols is that your service has to support however large a mailbox you want to keep, and I have users for whom 50 GB falls under "getting started". Even a home user has no trouble getting up to 5 or 10 GB and many retail ISPs think that a 1 GB mailbox is generous (and they charge exorbitant monthly fees to even upgrade customers to that much. A few MB is not an unusual limit with some ISPs and one of them still, in 2024, doesn't support IMAP). Yes, I know, switch to Gmail or something but some people are a bit - er, how shall I put this - reluctant to change their email address.

Re: I need classic outlook

"I don't see why you can't archive IMAP mail to a local folder/mailbox and then it doesn't matter who deletes the original mail or when it happens." - That would be a PST file, though, wouldn't it? Which is also not supported (er, "yet")

"As for lack of PST in the original post, the work around is to keep paying that subscription" - well unless you intended that remark sarcastically, that's naive.

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

Re: If he thinks that's bad he should try MacOS

"Who buys a desktop or laptop in order to use the bundled apps"

Apple users. Many of them buy / use very little else. Many swear by Mail, and it was far superior to the Outlook for Mac until about a decade ago which just cemented Apple's position in that market. Pages and whatever passes for a spreadsheet are adequate for 99% of home users. Safari, although horrible to those used to Firefox or Chrome, is not really that bad and for a long time was the only option on iOS devices so that established it for those users too.

So, yeah, assuming your experience is mirrored by everyone else is a classic projection error.

Re: If he thinks that's bad he should try MacOS

"MacOS does not require an Apple account"

That's simply not true. You can download nothing from the App store - which includes all OS and App updates - without an Apple account. Also, without that login you will be constantly nagged to sign in.

Re: Space Karen

I'd love to know what elements these are. I've been setting up Windows PCs without MS accounts for years - literally hundreds of them - and it'd be great to know what I am missing out on. Everything works to my satisfaction.