Posts by mistersaxon

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?

Proliferation of AI weapons among non-state actors 'could be impossible to stop'

Re: Orthogonal approach: local tech and education

“New Musks” is the Bad End we are trying to avoid tho.

'Thousands' at Meta face layoffs this week

They're doing it because the shareholders think cutting costs will increase the EPS / dividend / EBITDA / other shareholder-y BS. The shareholders "have a doody" (they're American you know) to their funds to "maximise returns" although they don't know how many of their shareholders they are trying to get fired right now, nor do they "have a doody" (they're still American at this point, even though their allegiance is to the dollar not the flag) not to put a burden on the state by dumping loads of people into economic peril or disaster (which - even in the US of A costs the taxpayers actual money)*.

*these shareholders are not taxpayers in any significant way of course. If they were they'd be more careful, but not paying tax is "cost cutting" in the same way as firing tens of thousands of people is.

Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

It's just a silly phase I'm going through...

Worked in a building where they made several offices into one open plan. That was how they discovered that some of the sockets were wired on one phase and some on another, after connecting a PC to one phase and the printer to the other...

But generally the worst electrical foul-ups I've come across have been where a UPS is the cause: one that decided to put 400V on the output, another that switched the power to the IBM mini off and on every 30 seconds and one that thought "hold my beer" and just flat out burst into flames - and that one was a room UPS. The fire brigade chopped the cables with a (heavily insulated) axe and pushed it out of the computer room into the yard because it was on wheels and they decided that was the easiest thing to do, and who am I to argue with a fireman holding an axe?

If you're lucky your UPS will fail to a safe state but it's more luck than design I feel. (and yes I know I'm being very very selective and that UPSes have saved WAY more bacon than they have flame-grilled - including mine. And yet I still have nightmares about the 20A circuit breaker that jammed half-open when a bulb blew out and tripped it and it burst into flames in my garage.)

Equinix would offer more liquid cooling but struggles without standards

Re: China Syndrome // server equivilent?

The question is what is the weight loading limit, whatever the floor is made of. Some IBM racks weigh 250kg or more EMPTY. Weight is already an issue in DCs…

Investor tells Google: Cut costs now and stop paying staff so much

Re: "not labor intensive"

They want Google to turn out like IBM. If they can’t see why that’s a bad idea it’s because the view is very limited when your head is up your own back passage.

IBM stock buybacks, sell-off of every possible subsidiary, lack of investment in R&D, short-sighted M&A policy* and their attempts to prune back employee wages and benefits, plus layoffs have all proven that driving down the “bottom line” in an attempt to increase dividend income (NOT share price) is a self-limiting plan as it affects the top line just as much as the bottom, possibly more so.

*still think they should have bought Sun instead of letting a major competitor have it.

Voyager 1 data corrupted by onboard computer that 'stopped working years ago'

Re: 70's Tech

Just resurrected a Quad303/33 system which is actually 60's tech, though it really needed wiring and cleaning more than major surgery. Sounds good though...

Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'

Umm

The urology department definitely take the piss though.

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Re: Honesty kills

In the interest of accuracy it's *chef's kiss* with an apostrophe to indicate that it is the (trademark) kiss of a chef, otherwise you are implicating a couple of chefs in something they don't necessarily consent to.

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

Re: fail - over?

Rounded down

Remember the humanoid Tesla robot? It's ready for September reveal, says Musk

Re: Yeah right

The other 10% of the time YOU HAVE TO DO IT. You don't just let the damn car CRASH unless you are a particularly dumb person who values their "principles"* over their life.

(* "Dammit, it says Full Self-Drive so by God it ought to do it! I'll be damned if I'll turn the steering wheel to save my own goddamn life when I paid a lotta money to have car do it!" is actually too long and profane to go on most headstones but otherwise that's what it would say)

Google Cloud growth slows, losses grow, bosses unworried

Re: So they lost less than a billion over $69.7 billion in revenue

Nobody can make over 100% of their profit doing anything. "Taxable" profit sure, that's a moveable feast for the lawyers and accountants to pick over, like seagulls following a trawler or sharks swarming over spilled chum, but "profit" is a thing - you can't have more than 100% of it no matter how big or small it is, except in comparison to something else.