Posts by mistersaxon

Five Eyes warn: Patch your Cisco SD-WAN or risk root takeover

Re: It's Cisco

No, you just need a maintenance contract for the equipment, or for it to be in warranty. Any old muppet can have the software - I know because they let *me* have it.

Microsoft to auto-launch Copilot in Edge whenever you click a link from Outlook

Deny, deny, deny

My work laptop camera shutter is permanently closed, as is the lid. I connect to it - if I ever have to - via RDP. Normally I only open it up to let it load patches, which there always are, of course (today we are updating the BIOS before anything else - good job I don’t need it to do anything urgent because it is NEVER available on demand). It’s annoying (because Teams is intrinsically a piece of s#it) but hey, it pays the bills. Mostly I use RDP on my own machine to connect to the servers where I do the actual work they pay me for. Email etc is just admin IMO.

Linus Torvalds: Stop making an issue out of AI slop in kernel docs – you're not changing anybody's mind

Re: paraphrase

Annoyingly, this was pretty much my interpretation, except that I wouldn't pretend I understand Linus Torvalds' mindset historically, as I know very little about him really. But you can infer the listed arguments from the text provided and they all seem to be there, presented factually. Does anyone think Gemini has missed any points made in that comment by LT? Or that it has introduced points or arguments that didn't really exist (i.e. that it may have over-emphasised or inferred too much? No, me either.

There is a meta-point though, which is that Torvalds' point was made only just coherently enough and that AI managed to clarify and codify the points decently (at a cost of 3.7MWh and 200l of water but hey...) and that is, in itself, an argument for saying that LT is right - AI as a tool, correctly used, can assist with the Linux Docs (and code) in meaningfully useful ways.

If you want to get meta-meta (and in the forums I think we all like that sort of thing, amirite?) then LT made his point at a level where he expected people of similar viewpoint and intelligence to parse it easily, and didn't much care if muggles struggled to understand him. He knows his audience and perhaps we (the great Reg-reading public) are an intersection with that audience and not a subset in the big Venn diagram of life? In which case Gemini has done some of us a solid... I doubt that was in Torvalds' mind when he spoke, but it may still prove his point.

Starlink satellite fails, polluting orbit with debris and falling toward Earth

Re: I missed the Geminids

This is starting to remind me of Day of the Triffids. Anyone been experimenting with ambulatory carnivorous plants recently to your knowledge?

Europe gets serious about cutting digital umbilical cord with Uncle Sam's big tech

Re: Shout It From The Rooftops

UK ( or any) government could just make it *illegal* for an extra-judicial entity to acquire a sovereign-owned entity that is supporting critical national infrastructure or GDPR(UK)-scoped data. If a private business chooses to put such data into foreign-owned businesses they should have to declare this and customers should then have a legal right to refuse them permission to do so (requiring them to have a split infrastructure, which is just too bad).

Obviously these days that would earn your premier a public lambasting from the Orange One (or other autocratic leader) and, failing sufficient diplomacy of the "bend over and think of <sovereign ruler>" kind, a threat of trade war, sanctions, or invasion (Venezuela and Greenland may be grappling with this existential threat right now), but certainly the legal framework can be created with little effort.

Untrained techie broke the rules, made a mistake, and found a better way to work

All fun and games until...

Dropping jobs into QCTL is fine unless the jobs have to run in a particular sequence, and then using an empty queue can mess that right up. The job might have run in 3 seconds because the input files it needed had not yet been populated by the other overnight jobs. Yes, of course it should check, but no, a lot of overnight batch processes really do rely on "probably fine" as the scheduling management policy. Or did, because is overnight batch even a thing in these days of 24x7x365.2217?

Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told

Re: Virginia, Texas ?

If only DT hadn't pissed off the world's first demi-trillionaire he could have given them the money as pocket lint or "decimal dust" I think they call it.

Re: I think the word "space" is a bit poorly defined

Technically impossible to "leave" Earth's gravity, although if you go far enough the influence becomes unmeasurable I believe. However, the moon is definitely still well within the reach of Earth's gravity so we probably don't have a vehicle that meets the criteria unless you want to hunt down Voyager 1 and get an astronaut to fly it home (Dr Strangelove style, I assume).

Junk is the new punk: Why we're falling back in love with retro tech

Re: Why ? Surely no one can't work it out ?

You can burn it to a physical CD or record it to a cassette using line out. D->A is easier than the other way or at least no harder.

Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore

Re: WRONG

There is no intelligence whatsoever in the AI and less than you'd like to believe on the human side of these interactions. What there /is/ is a lack of ability in humans to distinguish between predictability and intelligence, especially when the AI reinforces your views, supports your arguments and agrees with your delusions /whether it should or not/. (hint: it should just agree because why would you allow something this dumb to make a moral judgement? But adults* shouldn't let children play with these particularly dangerous "toys" at all.)

Luckily the AI doesn't yet appear to have its own agenda, but how would we know?

(*Let's assume there are adults somewhere in this mess, depressing as that assumption is. Otherwise is it just AI all the way down?)

Boffins devise voice-altering tech to jam 'vishing' schemes

Re: "calls relating to hospital appointments"

Hospitals may withhold numbers because they often expect staff to use their own mobiles to make calls and advise them to block their number (my wife is a nurse so I can assure you I am not making this up). Land lines are for incoming calls, not outgoing, typically with a voice mailbox attached that may or may not be integrated into the hospital messaging systems (at the J.R they are not, so a nurse will have to spend time each day going through the voicemails and adding notes to EPR, etc etc, and then calling back the triaged patients).

In a lot of cases calls from hospitals are from nurses who tend to be helpful and polite so if a patient gets their number you would not BELIEVE the amount of stupid calls and queries they will get, even using a work phone. And not just calls in work hours, either... People act like a nurse's time is theirs, forever.

Google makes end-to-end encrypted Gmail easy for all – even Outlook users

Re: another way to destroy email

Pretty sure Lotus Notes / Domino did / does this and has done for decades and that they were hardly the only company to do so, but hey, it's not real until Microsoft do it and are copying Google (or vice versa).

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

Re: Tounge in cheek?

Word is that nano-coated electrodes have gotten round the major issues with using zinc-ion batteries (such as accidentally producing hydrogen!), with allegedly 10's of 000's of recharge cycles. This is - if true - Very Good News Indeed, but it will move the market for solar and batteries a lot. I hope this next-gen technology works and is out soon enough to fit in the refresh timeline for my solar battery :)

Apple and Meta trade barbs over interoperability requests

Re: This is not either/or

Any recommendations Geoff? Nice to see you around BTW - I never get onto Cix/bikers these days :)

Re: go Apple

They would go after the employers - they already do in fact. If you think PAYE is not about preventing tax withholding as a form of protest then you are naive at best.

You need a separate phone for China and the USA anyway so what’s the difference? Fundamentally the issue is that big companies don’t let you own your phone or software and hence your data and in this interconnected world you have limited options to prevent that access.

Google Timeline location purge causes collateral damage

Re: How did they know you didn’t read the emails?

So the lack of response could reasonably be taken to indicate that the default action was OK with the recipient? Of course it could - especially since Google are not supposed to know the end user didn't even bother to read the emails. I'm sorry but I don't have a lot of sympathy with anyone's position on that basis.

Now a technical foul-up meaning they didn't protect something they said they would? Yes, that's bad. Ok, no, that's annoying. You weren't paying them to keep that data were you? It's like Sam with his memory problem - sounds like an awful condition to have but relying on a free service to safeguard something VERY precious to him? That's not wise.

Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

Re: Sloppy

Not any longer :)

Microsoft throws in the towel on HoloLens 2

My epitaph for HoloLens: A hollow laugh is how it ends.

We don't want mixed reality when it's mixed with a Windows PC!

We wanted apps that just felt zippy, not Bing or Edge or f*cking Clippy!

We wanted to keep all our data not find out you'd sold it, later.

We wanted bugs to be fixed fast - End user first, not left till last

We waited through the update crap, and heaps of unasked for login apps,

We waited for the network stack or apps to give our cursor back,

And then we waited even more for Edge to load or the "App store"!

We never wanted Acrobat! a simple viewer can do that...

We're tired of reboots. and "screens of death". We'll say this till our dying breath:

You wasted time on daft ideas and spent a fortune through the years

So, as HoloLens now fades to black: Let's just bring the Start button back!

US govt hiding top hurricane forecast model sparks outrage after deadly Helene

Re: Climate change again

Just to put this in perspective, you are suggesting that your daily peep at a public website and subsequent mental estimation of the path of a massive chunk of multi-level chaos is somehow on a par with a deeply-researched (and governmentally funded) body of weather data applied through a computer model with a computational power requirement that you wouldn't approach even in your wildest sessions of summoning AI-generated elves in various states of undress (and that last is a guess by me but look me in the eye and tell me you've never tried it)?

And that both are therefore worthless because *you* can't do weather modelling *in your head* for massive, complex storms, for which you do not have a significant level of input data?

You are correct that climate change is behind the "hot high pressure circulation in the Atlantic these days" but you can't be very surprised at getting downvotes for your base argument, can you?

Re: Yet another way Trump admin fucked the public

I expect Kamala Harris can spell "catastrophe" though, but you vote on what you imagine someone you don't know could or would do, so of course Trump the "Imaginary Hero" is going to look good - he's told you he's the best and because he is a white man he must be "righter" than Ms. Harris.

Also: "Who's worse , Trump for signing the agreement or Biden for doing nothing. ?" Trump is, for signing it. You over-estimate the ability that a President *who follows the laws of the country* has to overturn legally binding contracts, however unethical they may be, especially when a politically opposed Supreme Court will rule in favour of their "hero" and his legacy of failure, hate, division, corruption and violence. Or possibly, you rely on that level of ability.

Basically, "Khaptain" you sound like you're easily led so please follow that sign and go see the Egress.

And BTW I don't misspell Trump because it means "fart" and I appreciate that but you have no real reason to misspell Biden other than your low level of skills in a non-native language.

Microsoft security tools questioned for treating employees as threats

Re: Don't fret people

"had another software tool tag it as executable" is your problem here. Run your critical software on an OS with strong object typing, built-in auditing, a solid security model for data including row and column access control, etc.... Obviously this won't be a desktop OS but it *will* prevent this sort of nonsense. And yet I see more and more linux-based OSes in everything and they offer none of this.

Palo Alto Networks execs apologize for 'hostesses' dressed as lamps at Black Hat booth

Re: "Dude Looks Like a Lady"

The word you are grasping for is "person", though they seem to female-presenting at this life stage, judging by the comment. Only way to be sure of what they want / intend would be to ask them, which the previous poster doesn't seem to have done (or shared here anyway).

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

Re: It worked on my machine!

Or, as we like to call it: "increasing your attack surface"?

The graying open source community needs fresh blood

Re: New Cow Theory?

Not all young people have these experiences but I suspect they are the majority by a very large margin. But there is another way - all it needs is time and money (of course). Yes, I speak of "apprenticeships" - emphasis on the "app" these days - and I know that whereof I speak. One of my kids recently finished an apprenticeship at a national institution, being paid to get their degree, rather than ending 4 years of toil with a debt and no meaningful experience. They confidently write code for micro controllers, with c++, python, and low-level IO stuff, which is being used at the cutting edge of science research to hopefully help advance processes to recycle metals much more efficiently. Meanwhile, as a side hustle, they have been roped in to deliver an online course to local schools introducing the kids to Python (code, not Monty). They not only deliver the course (four times so far - once a year since they started their apprenticeship), but they also rewrote it into an online format so it could be delivered at all (using Jupyter notebooks, which this old fart has found to be really quite a lot of fun). Young people want to work, and want to do interesting things - don't we all?

But, of course, although these keen-eyed apprentices *are* working, they need to be taught and supervised so the RoI is not instant, and frankly that is why you have to rely on a quasi-governmental body to run such a program - businesses are far too busy cutting the bottom line while failing to notice that all their senior technical staff are getting older, slower, grumpier and proportionally less well-paid over time (cf. management). Heck, for the platforms I work on you can't even PAY the vendor for critical education in some areas. And that lack of interest by businesses in real investment in people is why this grey wave of doddering old wrecks is happening. Makes me very sad, to be honest.

Sodium ion batteries: Yet another innovation poised to be dominated by China

DoE - the youth award scheme is behind this? That's truly amazing if so.

Re: New tech

To be blunt though, the Chinese don't acknowledge our patent system at all so you have to wonder why we would acknowledge theirs. The issue is much more that we will need to steal all their research and tech knowledge to make any kind of an attempt to catch up with their lead at this point. And that is much harder to do than you'd like to think, because Western tech knowledge leaks into China through the many factories, but it really doesn't come the other way so much.

John Deere now considers VMs to be legacy tech, Ethernet and Wi-Fi on the brink

Re: What they actually mean is...

The difference is I have to carry round the hardware even if I don't buy it. It has weight, costs fuel to move and costs money to make (which ultimately I will be paying for). I'd like to charge them for displaying their logo honestly, if that's their attitude.

And BMW earn special ire for charging £300 to "activate" CarPlay (or equivalent) as though their standard dashboard is good enough. Does anyone else charge to activate CarPlay?

EU tells Meta it can't paywall privacy

Re: And how would that work?

It would look like Tumblr on the whole which makes suggestions for accounts (not posts) based on tags you have used on your posts, or you can search for tags and add those as separate feeds. Instagram *could* do that but the sparseness of the feed for new users would "put people off". I mean yes, it might, so have a decent onboarding process for new users - it's really not hard. Mastodon feeds are the same as well.

Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

Re: If LibreOffice provided anything even approaching an alternative to 365 in functionality ...

If you want to draw pretty pictures without Visio then draw.io is worth a look. It is definitely functional and can potentially read the Visio shape libraries that a lot of companies have created.

Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server

Re: Been there, done that.

Bet they billed for the licenses though, just didn’t buy them.

Maintenance?

3 hours of downtime including maintenance windows? Because cloud maintenance windows are usually counted as downtime if they cause disruption - and they can and do.

PostgreSQL pioneer's latest brainchild promises time travel to dodge ransomware

Nothing new here

An embedded d/b in the OS ? Well isn’t that IBM i ? (Or what used to known as AS/400 last century!)

And does this OS have a fully object-oriented structure as well? If not I have an idea about what their next “brainwave” might be…

McDonald's ordering system suffers McFlurry of tech troubles

Re: Table service

Blimey, it’s Geoff! You still on Cix?

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

Re: Question is...

Do you use Kindle Unlimited? It’s a decent benefit as are the free books of the month (or 99p) but that comes at a cost to the author I understand, so a lot of their add-ons don’t even cost them that much.

But I really use Prime for the delivery and so do many so expect to see that go soon - switched to the Prime Day delivery option and next-day will be extra per order or a plus tier.

In its tantrum with Europe, Apple broke web apps in iOS 17 beta, still hasn't fixed them

Re: a dev

No, it’s usually out of ignorance or laziness… or unjustified fear.

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

The Enshittification of Everything

Let's not kid ourselves, all this - not just tech, but all of it - is due to the weird shareholder mentality that growth is only ever reflected in an increasing share price, which in turn comes from a desire to own without consequence. If shareholders were forbidden from selling for, say, a year, they would HAVE to focus on getting a company to turn a real profit that could be paid as dividends. Sadly, that just leads to asset stripping or Murders and Acquisitions and nowhere is there any plan to genuinely deliver value to customers in return for their money.

The System Is Broken and billionaires break it faster and harder than anyone else. Grab your knife and fork folks, it's time to Eat the Rich. Not your well-off neighbour, but the ones with the yachts that cost more than your housing estate, let alone your house. Heck, a cutoff for consumption of a billion and up would be enough to turn this around.

Amazon Ring sounds death knell for surveillance as a service

Re: Are these pervy doorbells mandatory?

When my mother-in-law was being harassed by rogue traders the Ring doorbell visibly upset them and discouraged them, and footage from the camera which we sent to the police at their request was used to prosecute the vile leeches in question.

Will AI take our jobs? That's what everyone is talking about at Davos right now

Where have we heard this before?

"CEOs believe generative AI will make their companies more efficient, but more energy is needed to power the tech."

Is this not just the backstory of "The Matrix"? I mean, yes, it is, but that makes a change from the latest IT Big Idea being the backstory of "Terminator" at least...

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

Re: The customer is always right ...

That ONLY applies to matters of personal taste - if the customer wants a wide-brimmed turquoise hat and a flamingo-pink coat then don't argue with them, let them have it. That's where and why the remark was coined and should not be taken to apply to any other matters in the store, including such things as whether the customer gets a discount, payment terms, is allowed to defame staff or demand "compensation" for imagined slights, etc etc.

I do hate the way that piece of advice for sales staff has been taken and turned into a cudgel to be used against any member of staff, anywhere, at any time, for any reason.

NHS England published heavily redacted Palantir contract as festivities began

Re: The NHS Federated Data Platform and Palantir: 7 key risks

Palantir is a company that thinks everyone is stupid. Their name itself is a blatant taunt to privacy activists…

I say this because Palantir is a reference from Lord of the Rings, and refers specifically to a group of magical artefacts that were created with good intentions to enable global communications and were transformed by Sauron into a tool for mind control and surveillance. If that is an accident I’ll eat my hat.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

Since when was a corporation covered by the first amendment? Corporations can’t talk!

'Return to Office' declared dead

Re: Stick

Unionise. It’s just that simple.

And it certainly won’t hurt to untaboo talking about how much you earn. Managers rely on the fact that people just Don’t Talk About Their Wages (and it’s illegal to forbid this in a contract, though they do try) whereas it would be very enlightening to have that sort of info at annual review time.

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

Re: I got rejected on one

“Click all the squares containing pixels representing images of traffic lights”

Bomb scare causes mass evacuation at DEF CON

Mind bomb - nice!

I appreciated the the sub-heading. Thanks for reminding me that all my aspirations have shrivelled in the sun too.

Get your staff's consent before you monitor them, tech inquiry warns

Re: "and freed them up to focus on more sophisticated tasks beyond the scope of automation"

Amazon Warehouse goods finally reaching their proper level of utility...

Arc: A radical fresh take on the web browser

Why the fuck do they think I'm opening a new window?

Presumably they think you want to look at it so opening it where you are already looking is not a bad guess.

More annoyingly, why are half the functions and options for most applications STILL on the top bar and not in the app (or vice versa)? And why is there no keyboard shortcut to get to the top bar menu items as a rule. I don't always want to move my hands off the keyboard to grab a mouse or trackpad for a click to activate menus (or, I actually NEVER want to do this, and even if I did, I'd like the option not to have to).

Google's next big idea for browser security looks like another freedom grab to some

This is about Ad Nauseam isn’t it?

The plug-in that randomly clicks ad elements everywhere you go, making targeting and ad history effectively useless looks like they are just talking about it and then tried to claim their proposal would actually stop cheating in games etc etc.

Moral of story, it’s just about making sure you can’t block ads or “misuse” them. Get Ad Nauseam now and let’s see if we can make Google go bust before Christmas.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Jargon?

Pretty sure “moving forward” is just plain English unless it somehow gets egregiously misused. I’ve never heard it mean anything other than, well, moving forward. Sometimes not physically, only temporally but still…

And “double click”? I’m quite surprised that is considered jargon as the mouse paradigm is pretty baked in to the computer experience. Perhaps it needs to be updated to “double tap” to reflect the touch screen/ mobile world but I can see that causing more confusion rather than less. And not in a good way.

And I’m a bit shocked that “revert” didn’t make the list at all. Do people actually now think it simply means “reply” (which is how I see it used)? I gather this is common usage in India for some reason but revert =/= reply so why use it as though the words were the same? And if it did mean “reply” well we still have the actual word “reply” and that is shorter to type. If offered a revert in mail I tend to query it - am I picking a low hill to die on?

Kids these days, eh?

Keir Starmer's techno-fix for the NHS: Déjà vu disaster or brave new blunder?

John Armitage - who dat?

I mean I googled him and Wikipedia is not very informative but it's not clear how he is linked to any private healthcare company or companies. Do you have a source?

His giving to Labour, Sir Keir and Wes "Shadow Health" Streeting is provocative but if I'm going to make trouble with this information I'd like it to be detailed and specific trouble, you know?

Meanwhile you acknowledge that Labour are a somewhat less shite version of the Tories and that we deserve better - well, guess what? In this brave new world "slightly less shite" is the new "better" and since there isn't a perfect answer we'd better start incrementally, right? Or are you arguing that "somewhat worse than Labour" Tories are a better alternative than Labour? What we really need is an end to FPTP electoral systems and some proper PR so we get grown-up government that is suddenly a real job that takes work and skill, as that will weed out the current large crop of narcissistic buffoons and self-stuffing lawyers, neither of which groups really appreciates either compromise or hard work. We might even end up with an effective government that takes practical and pragmatic steps to improve the country in achievable ways - now wouldn't *that* be something?