Posts by Aoyagi Aichou

DARPA wants to upgrade the way we make chips. How exactly will that work?

No thanks

I came back to see if El Reg had perhaps reversed its continued Yankificaiton, only to be presented with "government news" filled with American news. Sad. Thanks for all the fish and all.

How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling

Yes, a big "thank you" for contributing to the continuing metastasising of American culture into Britain. All for the purpose of making a few lazy Yanks feel more comfortable, isn't it?

Google bans third-party call-recording apps from Play Store

NLL

I've been using ACR and following its struggles for a while. ACR can only record with microphone on my Cat S61 (Android 9) and it gets full call audio on my BB Priv (Android 6). Neither of the default "Phone" applications allow phone recording.

I suppose this just adds to the mounting pile of reasons for keeping the Priv forever.

Google is just being malicious with this.

AMD to Intel: Take our GPU talent? Two can play that game

They probably won't move forward much until they re-hire the chip Jesus, Jim Keller I reckon.

Boys outnumber girls 6 to 1 in UK compsci classes

Problem?

Is something preventing girls from choosing compsci?

BlackBerry offloads its 'legacy' patents – some of the stuff that made its phones hum

Legacy

"The company eventually stopped making handsets"

Not before they made the Priv, which is my primary smartphone to this day (two displays and two batteries later). I dread the day comes I have to move to 100% tap-typing, having to touch scroll, etc...

And I've never used a BBOS Blackberry device.

What does this Catapult IP Innovations entity intend to do with whatever they got their hands on anyway? Troll?

Head of Big Tech Expertise? Believe it or not, it's a UK.gov vacancy for a Whitehall job

CoI

It's probably difficult to find someone who would be in their pocket without some obvious conflict of interest.

Thunderbird 91 lands: Now native on Apple Silicon, swaps 'master' for 'primary' password, and more

Re: More like Chunderbird, amirite?

Not all advancements are good.

Google's diversity strat lead who said Jews have 'insatiable appetite for war' is no longer diversity strat lead

"Diversity"

Really looking forward to when this obsession with "diversity" just for the sake of it, driven by questionable people with nebulous aims is over.

Freenode IRC staff resign en masse, unhappy about new management

Re: User Ratio

I'd suggest Freenode has plenty of very healthy communities - https://puu.sh/HJvh4/f9cc8ae4eb.png

Re: Death to Kings!

All humans are.

Vivaldi update unleashes the 'Cookie Crumbler' to simply block any services asking for consent (sites may break)

Re: This.

That's beside the point, which is the difference between "opt in" and "consent". Any form of consent.

Interestingly enough, these "tracking technologies" of yours aren't mentioned once in the GDPR.

Re: This.

As far as I know, the EU regs require *consent*, not opt in.

Re: This.

It's just two clicks here. Hardly a dark pattern.

If you're a WhatsApp user, you'll have to share your personal data with Facebook's empire from next month – or stop using the chat app

Re: Telegram

I think it should be noted that Telegram has recently been slapped with some outrage because of their "find nearby" opt-in feature allows pinpointing users (with some degree of effort). Nothing major really, but it seems a bit sloppy from them.

AMD performance plummets when relying on battery power, says Intel. Let's take a closer look at those stats

Question

Isn't underclocking and power management in general broadly controlled by the Laptop manufacturer as opposed the CPU manufacturer? I think they are more likely to benefit from marketing hours upon hours of battery life thanks to aggressive throttling.

Regardless if I'm sat at a conference, and aeroplane, or at the garden, I want to have the option to be the one in control of these things. I want to be able to set all its components to be unrestricted by power-saving measures (assuming the battery can take it anyway).

Family meeting! Chocolate Factory makes its business-like video-chat service free to anyone with a Google account

Zoom?

I don't understand this. I work in Europe, with people from different countries, different firms, and different philosophies. I do conf calls about five times a week, too. Yet, not once, not even once I encountered Zoom. It's Webex, GoToMeeting, or whatever MS decided to call their confcall solution that week.

Microsoft attempts to up its Teams game with new features while locked-down folk flock to rival Zoom... warts and all

Windows?

Would be nice if it had this feature called "separate windows". Perhaps Microsoft has heard of it.

Here's what Europeans are buying amid the COVID-19 lockdown – aside from heaps of pasta and toilet paper

Webcams?

I was looking for a webcam (for my boss who is the sociable one of the two of us) and it looked like all the ones I would normally go for were out of stock.

Motorola bounds out the G8 with a harder, better, faster smartphone for the thrifty

Moto mods

I'm still disappointed the whole Moto mods business didn't take off. Can't think of a more innovative feature in phones since they started having an actual operating system, actually... There was also that Bullitt-built Land Rover phone with slide-on accessories as well.

This G8 is just another run-of-the-mill smartphone - HW specs spreadsheet with a price sticker.

If you're serious about browser privacy, you should probably pass on Edge or Yandex, claims Dublin professor

Is this relevant though?

I'm not sure if any privacy-conscious person would leave their browser in default settings. I mean it's nice to know which of the most popular browsers are the most aggressive, but in practice the user express-installs whatever is offered as default by their self-imposed walled garden, or uses whatever is pre-installed.

'Don't tell anyone but I have a secret.' There, that's my security sorted

Enlightened society

It's the current year and politicians are resigning from election clashes, if heated ones, over a privately shared rod polishing video in a remote extramarital relationship? Well if I've ever thought a society would rid itself of such prudeness, it would be the French one.

The BlackBerry may be dead, but others are lining up to take its place

Eh.

I'm just going to hold onto my Priv until it outlives me.

BlackBerry tells UK High Court that security outfit SentinelOne is its direct rival

Re: Old habits die hard

Or currently they might be a bit Lawsuit-In-Motion-Perpetually,

Electric cars can't cut UK carbon emissions while only the wealthy can afford to own one

Re: A bit out of date?

"I'm on my second EV (Nissan Leaf) and it is already price-competitive with an equivalent IC car if you look at overall cost of ownership."

This is absolutely false. Not only is the Leaf (which is a car that I genuinely like, by the way) significantly more higher an equivalent ICE car, but the costs of maintenance of EVs are generally rather generously underestimated.

"The only difference is range, and from personal experience that is a red herring for almost all usage patterns."

I don't know how many people do long trips often, but I don't think there's so few of them to wave them off like that.

Even Windows 10 can't save the PC market as chip shortages, Brexit uncertainties bite

Chip shortage?

Good heavens, don't frighten me like that. Brexit or not, I WILL have my fish&chips.

Woo-yay, Meltdown CPU fixes are here. Now, Spectre flaws will haunt tech industry for years

Practicality

So if I understand it correctly, neither Spectre is known to be used for any *practical* attacks? Like that password snooping demo of Meltdown floating around?

Nvidia: Using cheap GeForce, Titan GPUs in servers? Haha, nope!

Re: Miners great cancer research FU.

You have to employ purely profit-driven logic, free of the burden of any ethics, to understand that.

EULA?

EULAs have any legal power outside of the United States of Lard?

Shazam! Apple chucks £300m at Brit what's-that-song app – report

Re: Last.fm?

Unlikely. It's what (mostly American) megacorps do: they devour a company, consume only the assets that they're interest in, and then they let the organisation rot to its slow and utterly boring death through stagnation.

Universal basic income is a great idea, which is also why it won't happen

Re: It works..

The near-communism of Star Trek works because of seemingly infinite energy resources, i.e. almost a complete lack of scarcity. Until that point is reached, systems like UBI are going to help a few, but will be abused by many, especially those coming from "developing" countries. In fact, I'm not sure if I could resist such proposal (i.e. live a medicore life with no luxuries and play videogames, watch Netflix, or do whatever else I want all day) myself, being a lazy tw*t.

"Who exactly is going to do these jobs if they can live on a handout from the state?"

The Klingons, of course. It's only for their own good.

Google's macho memo man fired, say reports

Re: The World Athletics men's 100m final

Try Oxford's Equality & Diversity Unit, but you have to look them in the eye when you make the claim!

Diversity is good

I don't see how is diversity supposed to be good. Sure, there are situations when that statement is true, but it is very much case-by-case basis and I'm quite sure the cases where general diversity is a benefit is in the minority.

Russia, China vow to kill off VPNs, Tor browser

Re: meanwhile in advanced Western democracies..

But terrorism won't change our ways of life!

Encrypted chat app Telegram warned by Russian regulator: 'comply or goodbye'

Ha.

Moxie and others who keep yapping about how Telegram is insecure must be fuming. Or at least peddling back saying "I meant potentially".

EU ministers approve anti-hate speech video rules

The end is nigh.

With net neutrality creeping away, continually increasing governmental and corporate surveillance (including directly from this fine government), and this ongoing culling of free speech (as melodramatic as it sounds), I do wonder how the internet is going to look like in 2020, the year that feels like when the new cycle is going to start.

Frustrated by reboot-happy Windows 10? Creators Update hopes to take away the pain

Sounds like too little too late

Is it going to fix random resetting of various settings? Is it possible to disable driver updates now? Is it possible to handpick updates?

T-Mobile Czech ad man steals, sells, 1.5 million customer records

iDNES.cz

"Local media outlet iDNES.cz reported the breach ahead of T-Mobile's statement."

That outlet's parent company is owned by the Czech minister of finances, who also happens to be one of the richest people in the country (I guess this is what you call an oligarch). He probably just needed some data for his tax collection reform.

Telegram crammed: Hackers find way to send massive messages

I use Telegram, but not for security - it's because of the featureset. If I was deeply concerned about security, I don't think I would trust their homegrown "unproven" crypto, or their yet-to-be-opensourced server. The code that's available is just for the clients.

On the other hand, Moxie said is "confident" in WhatsApp's encryption since he was involved in developing and implementing it.

Is Windows 10 ignoring sysadmins' network QoS settings?

@Peter G Green

The update policies, which include driver updates through Windows Update, alone deserve that kind of a rant. As does the amount of work one has to do to make the OS not "pretty good to use" as you claim, but "about as good as Windows 7 to use".

Microsoft's Windows Phone folly costs it another billion dollars

Re: The irony

I'm not sure which "nice phones" you mean, but the newest ones (640, 950, etc) are very medicore in all aspects but the OS, which is... well, unready.

Re: Extinguish...

I'd just like to point out that HERE is not responsible for that "Maps" rubbish that Microsoft came up with.

90 days of Android sales almost beat 9 months' worth for all flavours of Win 10

Re: Symbian

While I've been using a Symbian smartphone as my primary phone for years now (808), I don't think they would be able to fix Symbian in time without some form of "burning platform (MeeGo)"... and as much as I like Symbian, I don't think it would be, at the time, the better choice of the two.

Of course, Microsoon came and made third, the worst choice, but that's another story.

@Danny 5

I'm running W10M on 1020, it's not lightning speed, but perfectly usable (albeit only through the Insider Programme thanks to Microsoft being a bunch of lying scumbags). The hardware itself feels incomparably better than the 950(XL).

Britain is sending a huge nuclear waste shipment to America. Why?

Diagnosing != curing

Feature-rich Vivaldi rolls out, offering power users a choice

Re: It may have some way to go but at least it continues for where Opera 12 left off...

For me there still are plenty of reasons to continue using O12.

Dragonfly, the neat :config, :cpu and :plugins windows, M2, tab stacking works better, deletes new cookies on exit, etc...

Just how close are Obama and Google? You won’t believe the answer

Re: What does Google have on the president?

It's Google. They have all the information.

Stop! Before you accept that Windows 10 Mobile upgrade, read this

Re: 1020 owner here

Thanks for the offer, but I don't know why should I downgrade my hardware to get the newest OS.

And yes, MS did promise to update *every* WP8 device to W10M. At least twice. I understand they didn't update weak devices, like the 520, but not updating fully capable phones like the 1020 or 925 is just pure scumbaggery.

Edit: Looks like you copied the message weirdly from the shill central, it's really a pain to read.

1020 owner here

The promise of arrival of W10M upon my device was the only reason why I hadn't thrown it away long time ago. I'm incredibly furious now. If this isn't planned obsolescence, I don't know what is.