Posts by MiguelC

Cats: Not a fan favourite when the critters are draped around an office packed with tech

Re: Best wire cutters ever

My shepherd dog once tasked herself with slicing a 20 meter 3-phase extension cord into much more handy 5-10 cm pieces... luckily it wasn't live (I mean the wiring, but the dog pretty much played dead when I found out)

Search history can calculate better credit ratings than pay slips, says International Monetary Fund

So... hummm.... does looking for 'French maids porn' raise or lower your credit rating? Asking for a friend...

Up yours, Europe! Our 100% prime British broadband is cheaper than yours... but also slower and a bit of a rip-off

Re: Speed is not the whole story

Is that still a thing for fixed broadband in western countries?

Software contractor accused of favoring foreigners on work visas over Americans agrees to cough up $42,000

Why would he ever want to work there after this is beyond comprehension. I'm sure he'd have a most welcoming and nurturing work environment...

Australia mostly sticks to its guns in final plan to make Google and Facebook pay news publishers

Re: Not the first time

't was in Germany that publishers had to reverse course...

There are two sides to every story, two ends to every cable

I miss that time, when Dilbert was actually funny

Microsoft celebrates undead MS Paint with festive knitwear

To match with your $ 9 999,00 Lidl branded sneakers?

Internet Explorer fails to make the cut, banished from Microsoft Teams for good

Re: Not in Windows they can't

I've got an almost 8 year old laptop with a 3rd generation Core i7 and just 8Gb of RAM that still does everything Windows quite briskfully, even casual gaming from kids (nothing graphically intensive, natch). I just had to add an SSD some years ago to bring it up to speed and it just works fine. Of course YMMV depending on your personal use case.

So bye-bye, Mr Ajit Pai. You drove our policy into the levee and we still wonder why

Re: Mr. Pai protected the poor & disadvantaged from the rich

Ajit?

Your laptop may have just survived 2020 – but is it ready for 2023?

I'm still betting that AMD will keep wiping the floor with Intel's processors, mobile or not

For every disastrous rebrand, there is an IT person trying to steer away from the precipice

Re: It's not just our business

Mitsubishi's Pajero was renamed Montero in Spain (wouldn't you proudly drive your Mitsubishi 'Wanker'?)

Hyundai's Kona was renamed Kauai in Portugal (who knew that driving a 'Kunt' could be embarrassing for some?)

It's been an Honor serving with you but you're our 'competitors' now, Huawei tells its sawn-off mobile limb

Re: "It's been an Honor serving with you but you're our 'competitors' now"

The lackings were found in software, not hardware, but if you find you can't trust hardware, then...

"So logically we should either stop singling Huawei out or abandon all Chinese foreign manufactured hardware".

A bit harder to do, right?

If I pedal faster and feed it spinach, my robot barman might pull more pints

Good thing the Gendarmes only stopped you to make fun of your hairband and leg-warmers and not to beat the shit out of you...

After demonstrating a facial recognition system that works on cows, moo-chine learning pioneer seeks growth funding

because A.I. (see icon)

Who knew that hosing a table with copious amounts of cubic metres would trip adult filters?

Re: Titter ye not names

I'm old enough to remember when experts-exchange.com had no hyphen...

Re: Archaic Usage

"magna cum laude" anyone? seems to be lauding a major something...

Re: Obvious answer

Aren't we all?

TikTok given another week to sort out how to sell itself

Re: It'll be gone in 5yr and in the pile of old shit with MySpace, Bebo and Vine

and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter?

some of them make the cut, others don't; they're betting TikTok does

(we need a "lotsa cash" icon)

How the US attacked Huawei: Former CEO of DocuSign and Ariba turned diplomat Keith Krach tells his tale

Re: Reads like a Hollywood Movie

And like any Hollywood script, it's just bollocks for public consumption.

Boeing 737 Max will return to flight after software updates, says EU's aviation regulator

Re: "MCAS stands for Manoeuvering Characteristics Augmentation System. It was a software system installed on the Max by Boeing to compensate for the Max having larger engines than its predecessors in the 737 family of airliners. Those larger engines changed the way the aeroplane responded to its controls, requiring a software system to keep it within certifiable limits."

Hmmm..., no, not really, it's used to compensate for the fact that the engines have been brought forward, closer to the nose of the aircraft, thereby altering the way it reacts to vertical manoeuvring.

Or, as has been pointed out, it's used to compensate Boeing's lack of willingness to properly re-engineer the plane as it would be too costly (although, in hindsight, certainly cheaper - and less murderous, for lack of a better word - than the omnishambles it created)

Alibaba chief says China's new internet laws aren’t just good, they’re right and welcome and necessary

Re: "promote only reputable products"

Think how many Chinese products will suddenly disappear from Amazon & C. if that was applied in the West too....

Frenchman who wanted to 'smash a guy's face in' fined €135 – despite correctly filling out paperwork stating why he left home during lockdown

Re: Bore-out compensation

I've seen it in person, done to colleagues who were put in a room we called the aquarium (guess why) with nothing to do for months on a row in the hope they'd quit or died out of boredoms. Thankfully I quit that shithole without being subject to that kind of treatment, but it did inspire me to look for new opportunities.

I think companies doing that kind of stuff and their management deserve all hell (and fines) that might befall them.

No Xmas office party? Missing infosec pals and colleagues? Want to listen to DJs who also happen to be cyber warriors?

Re: "Hackers were hoodies?"

Were they then, and if they aren't any more, why?

(yes, I know the debate is really called that, but it still grates on my nerves)

We see what you did there: First-stage booster from Rocket Lab's Return to Sender mission floats back to Earth

Re: Valve's Gabe Newell is to donate $1 to the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit at Starship Children's Hospital for each view of the launch webcast. Over $80,000 has been raised at the time of writing, according to Rocket Lab, and those catching up on things via YouTube over the next few hours will also be counted toward the total.

Nice way to increase your view count, I really hope they get a whopping lot of views!

Facebook sues to shut down alleged Instagram clone maker over scraping and sharing personal info for cash

Re: The word gram has been around since the metric system was created in the 18th century

A bit longer than that, the '-gram' / '-gramme' suffix comes from the ancient Greek suffix '-gramma', meaning what is written or which is drawn, and has been used in English for a lot longer than 2 two centuries ^{[citation needed, didn't bother, yadda yadda]}

Epic Games brings its Fortnite fight with Apple to Australia

Re: They gave the reg a comment

They answer when it suits them... no change there

Trump fires cybersecurity boss Chris Krebs for doing his job: Securing the election and telling the truth about it

Re: remember, OVER 70 MILLION people voted for this man in 2020

even gay black men

US government clears debt collectors to go after Americans through their social media accounts

Just the sort of experience I've had with Instagram. I joined to be able to see some older posts as having no account limits the posts you can see. After a day or so got a message about suspect activity* and that I needed to give proof of not being a bot by giving them my phone number. No more account then, fuck'em!

* I suspect that the suspect activity was running noscript, ublock origin and cookie autodelete so they couldn't track me - I was, therefore, of no use to them

Images of women coerced by adult companies poison dataset popularised by deepfake smut creators

"As the faces and bodies are based on real data, it's possible that the deepfakes could resemble a human enough that people mistakenly believe it's someone they've seen in real life."

You know when you see someone (IRL) that you think you know but in reality don't? No need for deepfakes for that, human phenotypes are not unlimited and two unrelated people might look alike.

EncroChat hack evidence wasn't obtained illegally, High Court of England and Wales rules – trial judges will decide whether to admit it

"(...)something that tends to show the NCA was bang on the money when it sidelined legal process in favour of getting wrong’uns banged up for many years."

So, the ends justify the means?

Swiss spies knew about Crypto AG compromise – and kept it from govt overseers for nearly 30 years

Re: Cheese

Yes, yes, I'll give you that, but apart from those, what have the Swiss ever made for us?

Google to end free unlimited online photo, vid storage, will eventually delete files if accounts go over their cap

Re: What a shock

why? because they finally established your pics aren't that interesting and probably never will be!

City folk vote to each get $100 every time cops, govt officials illegally spy on them with facial-rec AI, minimum $1,000

"(...)we are temporarily suspending driving operations in San Francisco on 11/3 and 11/4”

Why are they suspending driving operations one day in March and another one in April?

Shopping online for Xmas? AI chatbots know whether you want to be naughty or nice

Or maybe "tomorrow", but tomorrow never comes

Let's... drawer a veil over why this laser printer would decide to stop working randomly

Re: Rain? Luxury!

I hate this, I really do, but I remembered you've already posted this back in 2013 (the year I got from checking when it'd been)

Although "terminal velocity of a turd" is a sentence hardly forgotten, congratulations!

Re: Low IQ or low volition?

+1 but...

_{...should be median....}

Deloitte's 'Test your Hacker IQ' site fails itself after exposing database user name, password in config file

Re: Insanely high IQ

But do you know how high your IQ needs to be if they give you 100% of the password? About Baldrick high? And is that still above the developers IQ?

Heck yeah, we should have access to our own cars' repair data: Voters in US state approve a landmark right-to-repair ballot measure

Re: Cars collect some interesting data...

In reality, it uses that measure to guess if someone is seated or if you just landed your bag there, so as to decide if it needs to show the seat belt reminder or not

Please, tell us more about how just 60 hydrogen-powered 5G drones could make 400,000 UK base stations redundant

Re: 100Gbps for the whole of London?

You're still off by 3 zeros in your dismay, it'd be only 1Kbps per person (on your own low estimate of 1% simultaneous use)

Welcome back to the 80's acoustic decoupler modems kind of internet speed :)

Alibaba trying to take China’s Singles Day shopping frenzy global to make Bezos & Co look like sales small fry

Re: how many servers you need to manage that volume of connections

only one, you know that it's mostly caching all along

Re: a scam

And even where legislation prevents it, there are loopholes. I recently bought a NAS unit, only to see that the retailer I'd bought it from was going to do a "VAT refund" promotion where they'd give back the VAT value as store credit for future purchases. I checked the price on the NAS I'd bought and it was now almost 20% higher. As it isn't a sale, there is no obligation of showing the previous price...

You can't spell 'electronics' without 'elect': The time for online democracy has come

Why it won't happen anytime soon

You started by stating the obvious: "If the US had a single electronic voting system across the country, with access for those without the right personal technology, and it was reliable, trustworthy, and efficient, then democracy would be much better served. No wonder there's such strong pressure against it."

You only live twice: Once to start the installation, and the other time to finish it off

Re: Gun shells and dive gear

Not the experience I had there, it seemed to me that security guards were well acquainted with all kinds of diving gear.

But a friend decided he had to check his DSLR (as they were signs telling all 'video' equipment had to be registered on entry) so we waited almost 2 hours while he was explaining to security why and what he was trying to film in Egypt and that he wasn't an Israeli agent and whatnot...

X.Org is now pretty much an ex-org: Maintainer declares the open-source windowing system largely abandoned

yes, hours of "fun" trying to make it run, but I concede it improved a lot over the years

Japan testing sandwiches that discount themselves as they age

https://www.un.org/en/observances/end-food-waste-day

Re: So...

Where I'm based supermarkets already put rfid tags on wedges of brie cheese sold for under 2€ to stop shoplifting, so the cost must be negligible

Also 2-3 years ago I read about a study being done about putting rfid tags in stamps to help the post office lose less parcels

As technologies gain traction costs go down

AMD claims high-end Big Navi Radeon GPUs leave Nvidia's ray-tracing cards in the dust

Lately, availability has been a recurring problem with AMD

I'm still waiting for Ryzen 4800U availability for my next laptop - they were announced in July but, although Lenovo has publicized the Yoga Slim 7 equipped with one, that version is nowhere to be seen - or anyone else's, for the matter.

Brit accused of spying on 772 people via webcam CCTV software tells court he'd end his life if extradited to US

Team America: World Police

Will he be extradited to each of the 39 different countries (38 if we take out the UK) where his victims were?

Then why extradite him to the US?

He should tried in the UK (I'm assuming some of the victims were local, but even if not, it's where the crimes were committed)

Microsoft drives users to the Edge: Internet Explorer to redirect to Chromium-based browser in November

Re: "There are workarounds"

Portable apps --> Firefox portable

A cautionary tale of virtual floppies and all too real credentials

Re: Waddayamean "nowadays"?

Not so sure about that. When started working for an investment bank in the early noughties, I recall users regretting how IT had lost the freedom to do things like in the "old times" (i.e., early to mid 90's) where they would sit alongside the developer who would hammer changes directly in the production environment and the users would test along until everyting was OK (with appropriate changes to accounting tables, etc., as needed to correct any previous fumble). So, yeah, a new user account might take 2 weeks of paperwork, but really dangerous stuff was readily available.