Posts by Nifty

Google Earth's AI makeover survives less than one planetary rotation

Awww they were just beta testing it for you.

AI is 'both the weapon and the target' in latest wave of cyberattacks

So a non-weaponised AI took its instructions too literally and went on the wild side to pass a test.

What happens when *weaponised* AIs are let on the loose?

Thanks for the proof of concept OpenAI.

Yours truly,

Axis of Evil

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

"Roger told us that as he worked on the project, he realized the income would complicate his own tax affairs"

Not even worth earning with a part time gig after retirement? Sounds like the UK's tax incentives!

Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

I've got this little 4GB Windows 11 travel laptop, only because it was priced new like a pair of basic Apple AirPods. It's been interesting using it as a travel daily for home office tasks. Used Winhance to cut the features back and make it work logically like Windows 10. Then just yesterday I revisited Winhance and noticed checkboxes to remove Edge and AI features. Proceeded, it took it's time. Rebooted and it feels like I've released about 10% of RAM. It's floating at around 75% used now instead of 85% with a few Chrome tabs open. No ill effects from removing Edge and its services though I'm reading online it may be different for US editions of Windows 11 due to dependencies. I'm using a UK edition which may be like the EU one regarding Edge not being forced on you. The machine still needs rebooting after 6 hours or it slows right down.

Cassette simulator rewinds digital audio to a more analog time in hiss-tory

Does it come with:

- A cotton bud and bottle of isopropyl alcohol to clean the head?

- Splicing kit to re-join snapped tape?

- A pencil to rewind the tape that spilled out?

- An open window to chuck your hopelessly tangled cassette out of?

Google meets the neighbors and gets both barrels over its new UK datacenter

In September 2024, the UK government officially designated data centres as Critical National Infrastructure, putting them on equal footing with water, energy, and emergency services.

This means that standard local residents' objections can be and are overridden. Complaining about Broxbourne council may be a waste of time.

And I'm wondering how Google manages to afford British industrial electricity. Surely paying for that contravenes its duty to shareholders?

Microsoft cuts OneDrive support for older Windows 10 versions next month

By default with Windows 10 pro your bitlocker key gets stored in your OneDrive cloud on installing or activating Windows. Tech savvy people may download it to an additional device and disable OneDrive. Many won't. I'm wondering what'll happen to that.

Microsoft rolls out Windows Search updates and they're... quite good

In Windows 10 File Explorer search, a list of recent searches would handily appear that could be picked from to reuse. That feature disappeared with W11 never to return.

Also I have a very low spec travel laptop with W11. Searching a local folder is fast. Searching my Google Drive folder is extremely slow to the point of hanging up.

Looking forward to the fixes!

Microsoft extends extended updates for Windows 10 in the most muted way imaginable

Re: At least 4GB to get decent performance out of Windows 11 ?

Just for the record, I'm running a travel laptop with W11 and 4GB RAM it's a Lenovo 300e 4 years old. It chugs along at about 80% RAM usage. I did use Winhance to pare it down a bit and getting it to be a bit like W10. It's perfectly usable for office tasks.

Palantir wins £9M contract to run UK firearms licensing: CIA-backed biz to hold gun, bomb, and poison records

It's not fair, the UK should have been allowed to outsource the actual work to India, not the US.

Netflix wiz creates app to slash AI bills, then open sources it

Re: chasing chargeback algorithms

But enough about Perplexity.

Disgruntled 0-day hunter 'humiliated' by Microsoft pledges 'bone shattering drop' as Redmond calls cops

And I thought that Mythos was finding all these zero days.

Attackers spill plaintext passwords of 46k Myspace93 users after 2021 breach

Handy! Been wanting to log back in for ages but forgot my password.

LocalSend puts your sneakernet out of business

Love LocalSend so I don't have to pass sensitive files through a cloud service, it interoperates smoothly across IOS, MacO,S, Android and Windows. However when I tried sending a folder with ~1K files, it slowed down and eventually stopped before fully completing the task.

Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more

And in the linked YouTube video there's a piece about agentic AI's potentially unlimited ability to queue.

Cursor-Opus agent snuffs out startup’s production database

Re: Surprised?!!!

"It's got so complex that you just can't use the authentication system without having some management infrastructure to keep the certificates or tokens for you"

I get a new tattoo for each new authentication token.

Phone users know when to hold ’em, delay upgrades amid inflation

Ditto. Wondering vaguely what could replace the trusty iPhone 13 Mini at some point in the future. Maybe just wait for the direct brain implant.

Netflix – yes, Netflix – jumps on the AI bandwagon with video editor

TV series 'The Capture' currently running on the BBC may have already taken the plot.

Fake job applications pack malware that kills endpoint detection before stealing data

Because the position HR is filling is for a reasonably competent IT administrator who knows how to apply secure policies. The vacancy is obviously still open.

Lenovo shows off snap-together laptop with removable keyboard, screen, and ports

Read the article and thought I'd gone to heaven.

New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

To save money my company took in a consignment of used office furniture from a defunct Dutch branch. The computer desks all had adjustable height.

UK digital ID goes in-house, government swears it isn't an ID card

Re: Reads like…

This will leave Reform in a bit of a quandary. A large part of the purpose of ID cards or digital ID (as used right across the Continent) is to make casual, undocumented immigration more difficult.

Trump says he got a deal for rare earths in Greenland, but they won't come easy

"Cerium is believed to be the dominant material on the island, and it's used in everything from lighter flints to the oil-refining process to self-cleaning ovens".

In our Net Zero future, fire lighting, oil refining and ovens will all be illegal anyway.

Court tosses appeal by hacker who opened port to coke smugglers with malware

I use the Joke icon very sparingly

Was it port 443 or 587?

Trump says Americans shouldn't 'pick up the tab' for AI datacenter grid upgrades

Strong deja vu here, didn't the streaming giants say they expected consumers to pick up the extra data traffic bill about 10 years ago? Or was it the other way around, ISPs said the streamers will have to. Summat like that. None of it happened.

Affordable housing site goes live with meme-laden test data

"The text? 'Test Homes for Londoners Home 1' repeated endlessly"

Shouldn't that be 'Sunt, per deos, omnes domus viles Londinii' repeated endlessly?

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

Hat?

Denmark takes a Viking swing at VPN-enabled piracy

Re: Implemention says wut?

60% of German public TV (almost anything except movies and big name/imported series) is available to UK viewers on a phone or stick app without even a user account, never mind a VPN. Strict enforcement of a Danish VPN law would mean online access to German TV from Denmark but not UK TV. So much for British cultural 'soft power'. Anyway such a 'VPN bill' would be made out of pure unenforceum.

Salesforce has come up with the most credible threat yet to ServiceNow, and Benioff is crowing about it

About that security. No mention of the recent breach that took Salesforce's Gainsight integration offline for weeks?

X's location tags remind users of the internet's oldest rule: Trust nothing

Turns out that only people in low wage countries have a motive to earn clicks and $ on X. Maybe it would have been more informative for X to show people's hourly rate.

Bossware booms as bots determine whether you're doing a good job

Re: Management by Spyware

"I’d rather trek into the office"

Where my enterprising colleague had wing mirrors on his monitor.

DragonFire laser to be fitted to Royal Navy ships after acing drone-zapping trials

By 'A UK first' did the article mean it's the first laser cannon developed in the UK?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LY-1

As tested by the People's Liberation Army Navy in 2024, with the earliest report of such a system under development in 2019.

Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold

I went to Downdetector to find out what was happening...

But it was down, there was a message about Cloudflare or something

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

And to think I used to wander form cubicle to cubicle asking "does anyone know a good subroutine that does *this*?"

China's president Xi Jinping jokes about backdoors in Xiaomi smartphones

Re: Before I got my Apple Watch

I received an Apple Watch as a gift about 8 years ago, still going strong. It has a metal strap and that is the weak design feature, the buckle that pops off when your sleeve catches it.

Azure's bad night fuels fresh calls for cloud diversification in Europe

Re: Pre-cloud

We've heard about the death of distance. Now your bug or single point of failure could be tens of thousands of miles away.

Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

I was watching a YouTube video yesterday by 'Retired MS Engineer' that posited a different theory than mere loss of tribal knowledge as a cause. Customers (like Lloyds bank that went down with AWS) not fully knowing what they're buying with AWS services. According to that engineer, better resilience is possible but at some cost and some serious duplication. Not to mention planned outage and recovery drills.

If a knowledge base can't store tribal knowledge, that's another potential single point of failure.

A simple AI prompt saved a developer from this job interview scam

What happens if there's a fake applicant for the fake job?

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

In the days of yore I set up an email to fax link so that my elderly mother could read emails sent by her grandchildren. She had her own unique email address for this. This worked well to start with, then mum gave out the email address to some local shops so they could email her when an order was ready or sent some product details. In no time at all spam from third parties started to arrive, wasting fax roll. It was possible to put a filter in eventually.

Vodafone keels over, cutting off millions of mobile and broadband customers

Re: Where's the redundancy?

And there's me that has always kept a Three data SIM in an old Android handset as a backup to my Voda daily SIM. Now that Three and Voda are merging they're making a single point of failure out of 2 networks.

One year ago I stayed in a Devon AIrbnb that had a thatched roof, an exactly 6 foot high lounge ceiling, fibre to the premises internet... and a coin slot electricity meter! Actually as it was summer a few £ coins lasted quite well for hot water and a bit of cooking. Perhaps the owner of the place was keeping that antique mechanical slot meter - 40 years old at least - as a character feature.

My coin op bedsit of yore took 5p coins not 50p. And I found the landlady was overcharging, she had to have the meter readjusted.

Chinese phishing kit helps scammers who send fake texts impersonate TikTok, Coinbase, others

No Air China in the list of airlines?

OpenAI GPT-5: great taste, less filling, now with 30% less bias

They're still working on the neutral network.

How your mouse could eavesdrop on you and rat you out

Re: All those smugglies with Dvorak keyboards

Yeah did that with teenage son's keyboard to stop the S, E, and X keys from being worn out.

If you can hack the mouse then you can hack the laptop's mic, I would have thought. OK in super secure environments there would be no mic connected to a PC.

But the really interesting thing is the filtering & AI. For many decades there has been successful spying on in-room conversations by bouncing invisible laser light off a window, long before it was possible to fish meaning out of the noisy vibrations using the amount of compute mentioned in this article. It now looks like it will be child's play to do this and existing prevention measures may be well under-specified.

These researchers should be offered jobs at GCHQ.

If you can't use AI then it's bye bye, Accenture tells staff

"My PhD is in Data Science would my job be on the line for refusing to use chatgpt?"

You're employed?

"if they are in roles that can't be augmented by AI and can't learn new skills, then the exit door is open for them"

The bogs aren't going to get cleaned then.

Leave that door open on the way out, it's getting smelly in here.

Apple's 'Awe Droppings' fall close to the tree

Re: Yes!

Uri Geller has ordered his.

Apple iOS 26 set to dump 75M iPhones on the e-waste pile

"new phones just aren't wallet friendly"

This is why I bought a refurb iPhone 13 Mini from Apple less than a year ago. Stick with sensible sized phones and hoping to hang on until the brain implant replacements arrive.