Posts by Just Enough 852 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jul 2014
Sony still get a lot of online hate because of the stupidity of the 2005 rootkit fiasco. (It was over twenty years ago people!)
But the fact is they make quality audio-visual hardware. I've been buying Sony TVs most of my life. My next TV was almost certainly going to be Sony. Now I'm not so sure.
This move is a big disappointment.
Alas, we are in the days where multinational companies believe they are out of the reach of piddly little Governmental organisations. And they may be correct.
Meta is happy to ignore what they don't want to see or hear, and that includes the head of the UK’s Gambling Commission. If anything persistently makes enough noise that threatens their profits; that's what they have lawyers for. If the lawyers can't suffocate it, well, Meta just flushed tens of billions on Metaverse. Fines won't even scratch the surface.
Films and TV shows are not the same as software.
Most films and TV are watched once, maybe a couple of other times if you really liked it. Finding that it has become unavailable 5 years later is not a disaster. In most cases you have the option of buying the DVD.
Most software you will use repeatedly. Your 1000th use of it five years after you first purchased it could be just as vital as its first use. It can become integral to your business or personal life. Discovering that it has become unlicenced and therefore unusable could well be a disaster. You may have no other option.
You may be right that the average user doesn't care about "owning their own system".
But if you asked the average user; "Do you want to pay for this now and keep it forever? Or would you prefer to be paying for it for the rest of your life, every year, until we decide to take it off you, whether you like it or not?" I'm pretty sure how most would answer.
"based on the belief that their use of other people's content is lawful."
That's a very generous interpretation of what they believed. What's more likely is it was based on the belief that they were in a hurry, very rich, and could crush all legal challenges with lawyers later.
A hacker can compromise and alter digital exams in seconds, given the right access. How they going to do that with paper? Unleash a swarm of tiny robots with biros?
Exams are better on paper precisely because they are slower and harder to handle. They also make cheating (with AI or more traditional means) a whole lot harder. Basically we need exams that remove all intervening technology and are as direct a route to the brain of the candidate as possible.
This is definitely the insane part. I can't fathom why either company or senior staff would think that linking personal accounts and work accounts was a sensible and desirable. What happens when the member of staff decides to move on? Why does the member of staff not have reservations about their employers being entwined with their personal life? What if the staff member's personal on-line life is NSFW, yet accessible through the company's systems? What if the company locks down the senior staff's account for some reason, and inadvertently locks them out of their personal accounts too?
Never under estimate the user's ability to just have blind spots about what is happening on screen.
I once sat through a user demonstrating a problem they were having when booting their computer. They insisted it there was no error message, and it was just freezing. I ended up sitting next to them as the computer booted. In course of booting an error dialog appeared, but they clicked on it before I had time to read it.
"What was that?" I asked.
"What was what?" they replied.
"That error message you clicked."
"I didn't click anything."
"I just saw you. Let's reboot again. Do not click on anything."
Turns out that their computer had been warning of an impending full C: drive for months, but they didn't understand what it was saying, so had just been ignoring it. They had got in the habit of just clicking OK on the warning so often, they'd stopped even registering they were doing it. I practically had to grab the mouse off them to stop them.
Totally this. He committed to the repo details that allowed the script to be run by anyone, connecting with developer level permissions to a production database.
The person who ran it was probably either expecting the script to use the connection they already had, or prompt them for authentication. But instead it immediately ran against the database defined in the script. And it would also be storing a password in plain text, for all to see.
This is terrible code handling by Ray, who is far too smug about a situation he caused.
I can only suspect that the DBA hated their users, and actively wanted them to mess up.
At the very least remove permissions to do this sort of thing on the production tables. No-one should have permissions to do that except DBAs, who only uses their admin accounts when necessary.
If the users really need to be creating and dropping temporary working tables, then they should be doing that in their own separate schema, (supposing the database used provides for that).
Bobbies on the beat, that's what needed! Send a uniform around to these villains' gaff, give them a traditional cuff around the ear. That'll teach them and put an end to their shenanigans. None of this mucking about on computers. Police should be wearing out shoe leather on the streets, not shining the seat of their trousers at desks!
It worked for Dixon of Dock Green, no reason I can think of why it can't work today!
Arguing that she couldn't possibly have imagined that her husband would phone the police, is something that her lawyer will have to do. I don't rate their chances.
What did she imagine he'd do? I'm afraid it shows how social media obsessed individual can lose touch with reality and real-life consequences.
I don't know if I've had a single exchange with an AI chat bot that hasn't involved it telling me what a genius I am, and how perceptive and clever my questions are. Very flattering to read, but I'm beginning to doubt their sincerity and judgement.
Equally, they are very compliant and will happily change their tune to whatever it thinks I want to hear. I think chatbots in general need to be recalibrated to be more professionally distant and stop trying to pretend they are the user's greatest fan and pal.
Even the occasional "that's a dumb question" would be a breath of fresh air.
"A consumer's right to hear from candidates or parties, including solicitations for donations"
Somehow, I don't believe it's the consumer's rights that concerns them. They want the right to spam "the consumer" and "the consumer" to have no right to decide who gets to fill their mailbox.
Ultimately their argument is "Our spam is treated differently from their spam." Spam is spam. The solution, if indeed it is a problem, is to get tougher on all political spam of all kinds. Now unless they believe that spam is a much more effective fund-raiser for others, but insignificant to their fund-raising, I don't think this is their intended outcome.
"I happily run a Linux-based laptop which isn't even the latest and greatest but boots and it's ready to use in under 30 seconds, my 'corporate' Windows laptop can take anything from 5 minutes to to an hour to boot and fully log in."
So you want to know why your home laptop, connected to your home network, boots faster than your corporate laptop, connected to god knows how many layers of corporate network and security?
Why can I be on my bike and cycling down the road in seconds, when it takes over an hour to refuel and board an airplane before it takes off?
"The money was taken from a credit card, it was returned to the credit card, absolutely zero harm left outstanding, therefore no right to sue in any normal country..."
The debit on the credit card could have maxxed out the credit limit on the card, resulting in other charges being declined. Depending on what those charges were, this could cascade to who knows what level of grief for the credit card holder.
I think someone on this very website once boasted that they always modified their systems so that "the command that shall not be typed" always got intercepted by their own script, preventing its unthinking and accidental use. So it couldn't possibly happen to them.
Until they get so use to this safety net, they forget it's not standard on every remote console they could ever be connected to.
""All of the records were flagged with a test number – 1 – in an unused field,"
I wouldn't have touched this job until it is was clarified exactly what was meant by " – 1 –". I'd sound like an annoying pedant, but I'd be sure what was required before doing something disastrous.
And then I would have executed a SELECT before doing the DELETE.
Never mind disrepute, it would also be aiding and abetting a crime. Disbarring would be the least of it.
Lawyers provide a function in defending someone accused of a crime. This valid and legal relationship does not extend to assisting in committing the crime.
The only way this is going to work, if it actual is what it claims to be, is by the lawyers being an anonymous as their clients.
It's a fix, but a dangerous one. If all "Bryce" did was by-pass the last developer's code to get to the original executable, he'll never know what the last guy's code was supposed to be doing. It may have been dreadful, but it wasn't there for no reason.
Chances are it was fixing, badly, a bug that will rear its head again in due course. Or adding something new that's absence will become noticed within the following year. If Bryce really wanted a gold-star, his next job would be to try to work out what the crappy code was supposed to do, and just as importantly, why.
That page is a quintessential "How to draw an owl" instruction. It pretends its straightforward, but still manages to use terms that will scare the average computer user off the website. Even before they reach the distro specific instructions.
"distribution" - Is that a shop where I buy it?
"Flash" - Do what?
"correct keyboard combination beforehand" - Correct combination for what? Before what?
"Follow the instructions, and voilà!" - Draw the rest of the owl
Isn't this exactly how most crypto currencies work? Most of those "investing" are complicit and fully on board with the scam. They just reckon they won't be the mugs left holding the worthless bits at the end.
As for the rest of the "investors", well, a fool and his money, as they say.
