Posts by Calum Morrison

Ransomware crims forced to take off-RAMP as FBI seizes forum

When the hits dry up

I hadn't heard much from Dragonforce for a while (there's only so much widdly widdly parp parp powermetal one can take) but I hadn't realised they'd turned to the dark web. Who knew?

Notepad will now tell you all the ways Microsoft has enshittified it

We can't have it both ways - wanging on about Notepad++ et al with all their extras, then complaining when MS add anything to Notepad. I know some of the changes to the latter are intrusive, but from what I can tell, they can be turned off. Personally, I find it storing open files between reboots really handy, but I'm not at all bothered about formatting text or Copilot. I reckon I'll switch them off and get on with my life.

Open source's new mission: Rebuild a continent's tech stack

I fear calling it EUnux would castrate it at birth.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot app rebrand was bad, but there are far worse offenders

Re: Dear Microsoft

Cortana RIP

It wasn't jus tme that got annoyed/confused at logging into Office online only to find I was logging into Copilot then? The first few times I had to make sure I was definitely at the right place. I can see why they're doing it (copilotification of f**ing everything), but it's a pain in the browser.

Datacenters planned for Scotland could end up draining a loch of power

Re: Lochs of power

It's too vague a term. One Loch Ness > all the lakes in England and Wales both by volume and general excellence (and obviously deeper than 50 London buses), but a lochan may be no more than a couple of Olympic sized swimming pools and barely come up to an elephant's (backwards) knees.

Some things are just unknowable.

Haw Cruachan, do you know of any hydro power schemes in Scotland that *are* open for public tours? ;-)

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

Hey Copilot, make up a heartwarming, but chilling story about copyright infringmenent that I can use in a slide deck.

Samsung reveals its first tri-fold phone – and its desktop mode

Re: So, now it's tri-fold

You've never seen a tablet being used? Really? They're literally everywhere.

Seven years later, Airbus is still trying to kick its Microsoft habit

Re: 20 million cells?!

"Christ alive, have these people not heard of databases?"

Does Google have an equivalent to Access ;-)

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Clever but stupid

This entire stunt - unnecessarily endangering the company email server - was pulled by someone desperate to show Linux was better than Windows in terms of uptime, wasn't it?

Microsoft's plain text editor gets fancy as Notepad gains formatting options

Re: Correction

PureText is the answer for that - it sits in the system tray, you copy some text, click the PT icon and bang, it's stripped of all the crap you don't need.

Google begs owners of crippled Chromecasts not to hit factory reset

Re: Google "smart" speaker

I hear you - I steered the wife in the direction of a Sony Pebble digital music player (ipod knockoff, c 2004), thinking, they can't really be serious that it won't play mp3 files. They could, and they were.

Everything had to be ripped - in their clunky app - to atrac.

Eventually I believe they relented and updated (hit the switch) to allow mp3, but by that time what was a beautiful little device was drawerware, gathering dust and replaced by something that just worked.

The Windows Control Panel joins the ranks of the undead

The new printers area is (or was the last time I bothered looking) hopeless. New Outlook is a similar downgrade on what went before.

Report: Tech misconceptions plague the IT world

Re: Say what?

1s and 0s? Some people had all the luck. We didn't even have the concept of a numerical system.

All y'all love AI, right? Get ready for Gemini in Nest cameras, Google Assistant

That would explain why YouTube has suddenly started randomly disconnecting from my trusty old ChromeCast - it's to make me want something newer, and shinier, innit? But I *like* that it just rattles through my photos by default when nothing is streaming. I knew it couldn't last...

Big Music reprises classic hit 'ISPs need to stop their customers torrenting or we'll sue'

Re: Did they actually look at what was being torrented?

The article names music tracks that are mentioned in the deposition so, err, yeah?

Raspberry Pi OS airs out some fresh options for the summer

Re: Sunshine

By UK, I guess you mean England. Up here in Scotland we had a warm, wet winter and our reservoirs were fine. We also have little prospect of ever needing AC.

Miscreants claim they've snatched 560M people's info from Ticketmaster

I still fear multimedia attacks.

Google guru roasts useless phishing tests, calls for fire drill-style overhaul

Re: Not sure if it's possible

People responding here about obfuscating - or not - the URL are missing the point entirely. The vast majority of people have no idea what the URL actually means or how it works. And why should they?

It's not their job, it's often beyond their skillset, and it's not interesting to them if they can understand it. IT needs to do better. To extend the analogy, should office staff be expected to fight the fire itself (water or powder extinguisher?) or just get to safety quickly?

Notepad++ dev slams Google-clogging notepad.plus 'parasite'

A niche case I'll admit, but try scanning a barcode into new Notepad with a handheld bluetooth scanner (e.g. indistry standard Symbol) and ... w a i t as it inserts letter ... by ... letter.

Not sure what's gone wrong, but it's completely crippled now. Strange.

Windows Format dialog waited decades for UI revamp that never came

I'm guessing you mean my can of worms comment? You've totally got the wrong end of the stick. I'm completely for multiple ways to achieve the same thing, be they dead easy point and click or scriptable commands through PS. What I was aiming at (badly it would seem) is the garbage UI that's all over Windows, as alluded to in my original comment (MMC et al making terrible use of screen space) and some of the comments from people later in the thread.

There are few things that make me pine for Apple, but the MS UX is one of them. Jobs had many, many faults, but he'd rarely let the sort of really basic, stupid, ugly mistakes that we MS users have to put up with get past alpha, never mind beta testing.

It looks like I've opened a can of worms here. Obviously there are many ways to open that can, but all of them leave it half open with poor access to some of the worms and no access to the rest. I should have sold you a tin opener that does the job properly, rather than have you rely on the ring-pull supplied with the can but - despite having years of worm guzzlers testing the tin for me - I didn't spot the half-baked way I'd left it. My bad. Can I interest you in Can O' Worms 12?

It's far from the worst piece of UI design still kicking about. The way MMC windows scale for what looks like 640 x 480 monitors means every emergency trawl through an event log begins with setting the window to a usable format first.

The list of ports (IP addresses) on the printer Properties / Ports tab is a mess too - the selected one is always at the bottom of the list, there's not enough lateral space to display the useful bit of the IP address and as soon as you expand it to show that, it knocks the selected line off the bottom of the list. Burying it behind a load of submenus in Windows 11 hasn't helped. Thanks, MS.

The worst I ever had to deal with (thankfully no longer) was the list of mobile phones associated with a user account in Exchange - it was slightly less than one line deep IIRC, floating in a large grey empty dialogue box with space enough for a decent 10 line select. Like a lot of Exchange, it gave the impression it had been thrown together by the work experience kid.

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

I was referring to bakeries - it's a few years since I was in Germany, but I'd assume sausages mostly come from butchers.

There is nothing short of self-described "artisanal" bakers in the city I live that can hold a candle to a typical European high street staple. Crappy Victoria sponges (slathered in cheap icing and layered with "creme"), low quality bread and the aforementioned beige pastires are celebrated almost as gourmet by people who - literally - don't seem to know better.

I've travelled extensively across the US and Europ and it's not me fetishising foreign - most US food is similar slop, majoring on quantity over quality. Our neigbours in southern Europe still have a bit of dignity about what they put in their mouths, though they seem to be following us down the greasy slope, albeit at slower rate.

Where you went wrong was assuming that Britons care about the actual quality or flavour of their food. As with so many things on this island, we accept - and celebrate - produce that would barely pass as acceptable for most nations. As a bakery, Greggs - and most high street independents - wouldn't be fit to fill the bins of their continental equivalent. And yet people here fetishise its wares.

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

Re: Deliberation

Not saying they're not a concern but they don't have anything like the reach that Google has. My 2009 Alfa Romeo 159 had a rather sorry MS-branded USB hi-fi that allowed me to scroll through MP3 tracks on a memory stick. A 2023 Volvo (or Polestar, or Geely, or London Taxi...) has its entire operating system run by Google, collecting metrics on everything from location to weather to traffic to music played, to passengers carried etc, etc, etc. Now that's a lot of data.

Re: Deliberation

None of them were, but Google was just better. Remember their super clean interface, just as the rest started cluttering things up.

Re: Deliberation

Easier said than done; I'd love to see it, but Altavista wasn't embedded in almost literally everything back then so it was easier for us all to switch to this hot new thing that just worked. Google have been very clever about how far and wide they have grown. There's barely an area of business, never mind just technology, that doesn't have it plumbed in like a canc, err, viru, err... Hell, it's been a verb for a generation. And to think, we used to worry about Microsoft's dominance.

Microsoft pulls the plug on WordPad, the world's least favorite text editor

Re: It's all crap

Not sure what you're using, but if it's better than O&O AppBuster (I think El Reg mentioned it a couple of years ago) then please let me know. OOAPB is the first thing that runs on any new PC that crosses my path. Just why each PC has so much X Box crud on it, I don't know...

Tech support done bad sure makes it hard to do tech support good

Re: Its always DNS except when its configured with an IP address :)

Because DNS is *never* the issue.

You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused

Re: is 10x $$$ normal?

With consumer broadband, they'd likely then have just had ten lines out of action and ten routers needlessly consuming power in a cupboard somewhere.

Digital memories are disappearing and not even AI or Google can help

Re: Preserve the meaning of our personal past

If computing continues to accelerate at the rates we've seen, a kid's toy of the future will have the power to decrypt all your strongest encryption. That's almost guaranteed.

Another month, another bunch of fixes for Microsoft security bugs exploited in the wild

Re: Ah, Patch Tuesday...

More than one reboot per patch Tuesday is very unusual; trust me, my users would soon complain if it weren't. These guys never reboot their PCs except when forced to :-(

Dell Command will look to restart it too if it's applying firmware or pretty much anything else, but it's usually possible to update Windows and Command on the same reboot.

Re: Ah, Patch Tuesday...

He's absolutely not saying that; he said no separate reboots were required. Remember the old days of Windows when a typical PT would require install, reboot, install, reboot etc. depending on what was needed. In the days of Windows 10 and 11, one reboot is usually all that's required.

Re: Ah, Patch Tuesday...

Mixed network of HP and Dell i3 and i5 desktops and laptops. Monitored a couple manually this week to watch how the patching went; max of half an hour each including download (OK, via WSUS from a local server) and reboot. Even building a new PC would take no more than an hour or two on typical hardware, downloading updates over a 300Mb leased line.Are you on dialup?

Re: Ah, Patch Tuesday...

If it's taking that, errr, maybe tell Mint to give it a bit more resource? No Windows PC with the recommended hardware for the OS will take 3 hours to update.

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Lucky it was switched off when (and by) the cleaner was running the hoover then or it'd have caused financial meltdown in the US each evening.

If you like to play along with the illusion of privacy, smart devices are a dumb idea

Re: Why would a Washing Machine require my Date of Birth ...

So they can sell it of course! My DuckDuckGo app tracking protection reminds me weekly that, for some reason, my Hoover washing machine is trying to give my birthday and many other items of information to Verizon media. I'm sure it's all perfectly innocent.

The price of freedom turned out to be an afternoon of tech panic

Re: I'll assume this was America

I know of at least one with an Eastern theme that has no ties to the US, and famously a Brazilian-styled chain was in the news a few years ago for sharp practices. Not every baddie is American - we have plenty of homegrown crooks.

Re: I'll assume this was America

If you think this sort of thing only happens in restaurants in the US and not the UK then you've lead a sheltered life. Some of our "favourite" chains shaft their staff for all sorts of things like this as a matter of course - it's endemic.

How prompt injection attacks hijack today's top-end AI – and it's tough to fix

Re: Can you help?

Fuuuuuuuuuck!!!! The AI knows more about XKCD than the geeks do. This is it folks, the biggie. We're doomed. I for one welcome our new etc.

Microsoft: Patch this severe Outlook bug that Russian miscreants exploited

Re: Update progress?

If you need to remove all the crud that comes pre-installed with Windows (including Skype and X- Box etc.) you need O&O App Buster. Someone mentioned it on here a few months ago and it's been part of my installation routine ever since. It's just fantastic.

Requiem for Google Reader, dead for a decade but not forgotten

Re: Article written by an idiot

No, I think it even has Lars' seal of approval these days - it's just a Spotify/Apple Music/Deezer/Amazon Music clone albeit a bit laggy in the interface and the release schedules. Its main saving grace for me is not giving any cash to Daniel Ek.

Re: Article written by an idiot

That's a compliment from one geek to another. How many of us do things a certain way because we're perfectly happy doing so and it pleases us, even though we know there's easier methods? I took some time last night to use MP3Tag to tidy up the cover art and track listings of a couple of albums when it would be far easier just to stream from my Napster subscription than curate my own collection. Napster you ask? Why yes, I use a slightly crappy, more limited music service because it apparently pays a teensy bit more than Spotify per stream to the artists I cherish. Ans sometimes I listen to the same music on vinyl.

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Re: Pot, kettle...

It is indeed their browser and yes, they can do what they like with it, but - call it a gentleman's agreement - it's not something browsers have done in the past so it's unexpected at best, unwelcome at worst. If I host a website, I like to think that I have a degree of control over what "it" displays to the user. OK, I give up some of that if I sell ads on it, but there's a quid pro quo there. In this case Google are actually harmed by it (no, I'm not crying for them either) and the worry is where this will stop - I already have to disable the News and Interests pop-up from displaying clickbait links from downmarket tabloids if I happen to brush my mouse over it so it's not like MS don't have form.

Re: Pot, kettle...

How is it different? Really? Google is THEIR search results page that THEY code and host. They can do what the hell they like with it, just like Microsoft can do what the hell they like with Bing for what it's worth. This is Microsoft ostensibly placing code on Google's page and that is wrong. That's what's different.

Re: This isn't that new

Yep, but that's on Bing, their own site. This is ostensibly on someone else's web site - it's annoying, it's creepy, and - per the article - it's potentially the start of a slippery slope in terms of what users come to expect of a browser so could be a behavioural security issue.

Being quite honest, Microsoft's tricks to prevent me using the browser and PDF app of my choice only make me more determined. Just how often do they expect me to believe that some weird thing has happened that's meant both have had to be reset to Edge?

Big Apple locals hire Russians to game New York's taxi system

Re: What is this shit?

That sounds a better bet, though persuading the Mrs that she'd then want to transfer to a second taxi after a GLA-LHR shuttle, transfer, 7ish hours to JFK, 2 hours immigration then an hour in traffic may be my undoing!

Best result ever was BA mislaying our luggage meaning we were deposited at Newark with our $250 compo vouchers (c/o business class on Avios) and nowt but hand baggage - quick train into Penn and up the stairs to our digs in the New Yorker. The luggage arrived by next flight and courier the next morning - result!