Posts by WolfFan

Microsoft teases targeted Copilot removal for admins

Re: who's got the registry hack

This has been tested on my machine and seems to work so far.

The Code (to create the .reg file):

Open Notepad.

Paste the following:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot]

“TurnOffWindowsCopilot”=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot]

“TurnOffWindowsCopilot”=dword:00000001

Save the file as DisableCopilot.reg.

Double-click it and select Yes to merge.

Restart your PC.

Zuck buys Chinese AI company Manus that claims it deals in actions, not words

Re: Mark Zuckerberg wants to build a ...

Skynet.

Garmin autopilot lands small aircraft without human assistance

There was a recent incident just north of here. https://www.wesh.com/article/small-aircraft-crash-i-95-brevard-county/69665707 I would say that landing on the highway is NOT a good idea.

India demands smartphone makers install a government app on every handset

Re: Do you trust ME or your LYIN' eyes?

The people in India haven't trusted their government(s) since the days of the Mughals. Possibly earlier.

Re: Never gonna happen

Apple has already said that they won't be installing the app. https://www.macworld.com/article/2997281/apple-refuses-to-pre-install-government-app-on-iphones-in-india.html

Apple says no

https://www.macworld.com/article/2997281/apple-refuses-to-pre-install-government-app-on-iphones-in-india.html

Microsoft appears to move on from its most loyal ‘customers’ – Contoso and Fabrikam

Re: Zara may want to have a word or two....

Ahem. Whenever I see ‘Project Pluto’ I think of… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto which was possibly the most insane idea ever perpetuated by the US Air Farce. And they’ve had a lot of insane ideas.

Lifeboat docks with Tiangong after cracked capsule triggers emergency rendezvous

Houston, we have a problem

Y’all left out Apollo 13. And, my personal fav, Voskhod 2. Woof-woof-woof-AWOOO, there be wolves around your spacecraft. Get out the pistol, boys!

Google's AI is eating your email by default. Here's how to shut its mouth

Re: Lightbulb above head moment.

The Don spends one day a week as Donna, not one day a year.

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

Re: Those were the innocent days...

You rebooted every 30 days or less with Win95/8/8SE. Usually, less, as something would crash and force a reboot. Often several reboots in a week. Sometimes several reboots in a day.

In those days I had a Mac at home and my work box was a VAX cluster... but the department had to try to keep a bunch of DOS/Win3.11/Win9x systems running for the hoi poloi. The Urge To Nuke Redmond was... hard to resist.

Uptime. We loves it, my precious.

Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia

It's a wasteland, infested by drop bears, cassowaries, emus, kangaroos, assorted highly venomous snakes, assorted highly venomous, highly aggressive spiders, and, most dangerous, Australians.

Researchers claim 'largest leak ever' after uncovering WhatsApp enumeration flaw

Re: Wait, what?

Heh. There's a reason why I use throway accounts for sign-ins to things like El Reg, and, if I had any, which I don't, to ArseBook/What'sNonsense/other anti-social media. The account I used to sign up for El Reg has a nice pic, of a wolf, a very handsome wolf with lots of very big teeth. (I like wolves...) And all PII on that profile are deliberately inaccurate; I have several throw-away emails which I use for various sites, with different profiles, pix, PII, etc. I have a nice little SQL-based database on my iPad which I use to keep track of which profiles say what; the data can be exported to the DBMS on my desktop systems (not Access, Access doesn't run on Macs) and I can mess with it at will. (I have a LOT of throwaways.) My real pic is not even on my various Apple or (soon to die) MS accounts and will NEVER be anywhere near Google accounts if I can prevent it. (My 'personal' MS account has a pic of Commander Adama with Galactia in the background. Commander Adama has the proper attitude towards network security. So say we all.)

How to bluff your way to AI credibility with the right buzzwords

Ah’ll be bach in 20 seconds

'AI accuracy' makes me think of Terminators. Or or maybe ED-209s.

UK tribunal says reselling Microsoft licenses is A-OK

MS Licensing idiocy

So I have installed LibreOffice at home and am in the process of installing it on all work systems. However... I do some work for a local 3try level institution. They give away a 'free' copy of MS Office, and it's installed on school devices. Such as my school laptop. I have a 'personal' OneDrive (30 GB) and two 'business/education' OneDrives (1 TB each). LibreOffice works on files in all three OneDrives, and in Apple iCloud (2 TB) and in Google Drive (15 GB) and in DropBox (2.5 GB). Back when I had a 'personal' copy of MS Office, terminated years ago, it worked in my personal OneDrive, and, with effort, in iCloud and DropBox; I didn't have Google Drive then. It would complain that I needed to 'log in' when trying to access files on the 'business/education' OneDrives, and no, the 'personal' login wouldn't work. The school MS Office install will access files on the local drive, on the appropriate 'business/education' OneDrive, but insists on getting a 'login' on the other 'business/education' OneDrive and the 'personal' OneDrive, and no, the school login won't do.

MS wants me to get a fully installed, fully licensed, copy of Office 365 for my 'personal' OneDrive and a different one for the other 'business/education' OneDrive. This is not going to happen. LibreOffice works. Apple iWorks works (for certain values of 'working' for Numbers, possibly the worst app ever perpetuated by Apple). WPS works. WordPerfect Office works. I use MS Office on school equipment because the school insists; I use LibreOffice and iWorks (ok, Pages and Keynote, I really hate Numbers) for everything else. If LibreOffice worked on iPadOS I suspect that I'd stop using iWorks. For reasons of ideology LibreOffice is not available on iPadOS; Collabra is; Collabra is kinda-sorta a fork of LibreOffice only not as good, the day that LibreOffice works on iPadOS is the day that Collabra gets banished into The Outer Darkness, but I'm not holding my breath waiting. There will NEVER be new installs of MS Office on my personal systems, or at the office. The office OneDrive will probably go away sometime soon. I don't care. In the meantime I use MS Office on school equipment at school, and only at school. Notably certain 'portals' can detect if a file was done in, say, DOCX format using LibreOffice or Pages, and will reject them, so the most common use of MS Office is to open files I worked on using sensible software in MS Office, do a save as, and submit. And that means putting the file onto the school OneDrive, or MS Office will start bleating about needing a login.

MS is doing their very best to attempt to use their market position to try to force their crap, including CoPileOfShit, onto all systems. Not happening here. What they are succeeding in doing is to make some users avoid MS software at almost all costs.

The real reason why MS is screaming about reselling is that they don't get any money from the resale, and older versions aren't as restricted as newer versions, and, most especially, older versions don't have any CoPileOfShit. The harder they squeeze, the more users slip through their fingers. Bite me, Grand Moff Nadalla.

You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will

Re: re: this problem will linger long into the future.

It is? But Data seemed so real! He behaves just like one of the sysadmins!

Re: Forcing regular change is counterintuitive

heh. One site I go to quite often requires a new password every 3 months and has strict requirements. So my password there is <five characters, one of them a capital><symbol><two numbers><four characters, one of them a capital>. That's the required 12 character limit, with a symbol, at least one capital, and at least two numbers. The two numbers start at 00 and advance one digit per password reset to 09. I then change the symbol and start the numbers over at 00. The five and the four characters have not changed in over a decade. The email address associated with the site is a @outlook.com throwaway which I generated specifically for this site and which is used only there; the idiots also insist on webmail, so that particular email is monitored only by their webmail. The only mail I get there is from them... and spam. Lots and lots and lots of spam, almost as if someone other than myself and those idiots (and Microsoft, of course) had access to a strangely formatted email address used nowhere else.

Re: Still harping over forum passwords

Change one of the £s to # and one of the bs to B.

MIT Sloan quietly shelves AI ransomware study after researcher calls BS

98.92467% of MS Windows 11 users want to visit Redmond, Washington. By air. Using a Tu-95 and with a copy of the Tsar Bomba, only at full power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

O2 cranks prices mid-contract, essentially telling customers to like it or lump it

Somehow, I doubt this.

Microsoft Azure challenges AWS for downtime crown

They’d lose too much stuff if they stepped back to 2009.

This security hole can crash billions of Chromium browsers, and Google hasn't patched it yet

Re: That's a bummer

Interesting. Doesn’t happen here. Currently looking at Firefox running on a Win10 system, on a Ubuntu system, and a Mac. Multiple tabs and windows open on each. The Win10 machine hasn’t beenn restarted since Patch Tuesday; that’s more than 10 days. The Ubuntu and the Mac were last restarted last month; that’s also more than 10 days. Firfox starts up on startup on all three, and it’s never closed until shutdown.

Zen Internet loses unfair dismissal appeal case with former CEO

Re: Pointless growth attempt

Nothing in the UK is as bad as BT. And outside the UK only Cable&Wireless, by whatever name they’re hiding behind, are worse. Yes, Cable&WIreless and BT are worse than Comlast and Always Totally Terrible, hard though that may be to believe; Comlast is, after all, the reigning #1 worst ISP in the US, having tried very hard to achieve that lofty status. Always Totally Terrible is #2, mostly because Comlast tries so hard to hold onto the top spot, and despite strong competition from Verizscum.

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

I’d pay real money to see the Crawler headed north on I-95 from KSC and then back from DC on 95 to I-10 and Texas. I'd pay even more if it could be arranged that Ronda DeSatan was the driver, it'd keep ol' Ronda busy for a few months. With Skeletor Scott as the relief driver. Bliss.

Shield AI shows off not-at-all-terrifying autonomous VTOL combat drone

ED-209

You have a negative attitude. Surrender immediately. You have 20 seconds to comply.

Re: Vulcan

I’d have gone with option 2, as I’m pretty sure that HM Submarines would be rather busy.

BBC probe finds AI chatbots mangle nearly half of news summaries

Bloody hell

Google Gemini is _significantly_ worse than MS CoPilot? Google, m’lads, you really need to fix this. You just can’t allow MS to be better than you. You really can’t.

Note that I still delete CoPilot whereever and whenever I can.

Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers

Re: Just asking

Both.

Apple’s AirDrop makes weird latency spikes for Wi-Fi wonks, researcher finds

Re: Do As I Say

Hmm. I use it several times a week, to move various small files around. It has been fast enough and has failed once in the last month and a half; a second attempt worked. The biggest file I’ve AirDropped was about 1 GB, most were under 75 MB.

AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists

16 GB while unconscious

Anyone who pays $200/month for an electric blanket has minimal consciousness in the first place.

AWS admits more bits of its cloud broke as it recovered from DynamoDB debacle

Nope. We were still having problems until around 19:00 Eastern. We did not have full and complete access until 19:33 Eastern. Subtract three hours for West Coast time. Add five hours for GMT. Some of our systems were operational at 08:00 but failed by 11:00, some were dead at 08:00. So that's eight to eleven hours of no service, which could have been avoided if only our stuff was on prem.

Microsoft's OneDrive spots your mates, remembers their faces, and won't forget easily

And this would be a problem... why?

Microsoft moves to the uncanny valley with creepy Copilot avatars that stare at you and say your name

Re: Clippy

It's not Clippy. It's Rover, the dog who did search for far too long in the early WinXP/Microsoft BOB era. You young whipper-snappers all fail to recall The Very Worst OS/Shell/whatever ever perpetuated by anyone, not just Microsoft: BOB. BOB gave us Rover. And Comic Sans. And those were its good points. You didn't kill BOB with fire; it might return from the ashes. No, you put a stake through its heart then cut off its head and buried the head at a crossroads. And sprinkled holy water generously on both head and body. And cursed both head and body, bell, book, and candle.

Copilot is the new BOB. Be afraid. Be very afraid., And get a good supply of holy water.

Re: Licence Hatsune Miku for Japan.

Not since Bill Gates left.

UK splurges £4.4M on drones, e-planes, and other flights of fancy

Re: OXCAM

It's powered by Red Bull?

Tesla Model Ys recalled Down Under for overly enthusiastic electric windows

Re: Newsworthy?

The Musketeer was always crazy, you just didn't see The Truth. And you still own a wakenpanzer. Bad boy.

Pentagon ends Microsoft's use of China-based support staff for DoD cloud

Re: Flag: I don't want to worry anyone, but

It’s the old, pre-1959, flag. Alaska and Hawaii became states in 1959.

It’s a common error. The other way, using the 50-star flag when deplicting events prior to 1959, has happened on several tv shows and movies. And at least one Western epic set just after the American Civil War has used the 48-star flag, which amused me no end, as the 48-star flag dates from 1912. (I was told to shut up, it’s just a movie. It also had the Colt Single Action Army 0.45 revolver, despite being set in 1867 when the Colt was designed in 1872 and adopted by the US Army in 1873. And the Winchester 73, also from 1873. I had _fun_ spotting anacronisms in that thing.)

HP bottom line fattens up on a diet of AI PCs and Windows 11

Reason #1329 to never buy anything from HP ever again

See subject.

Five years – that's how long Anthropic will store Claude chats unless you opt out

Hmm.

1. Find the physical addresses of the company and as many of the executives as possible.

2. Set up a chat describing how a completely hypothetical, utterly fictitious, terror group might go to those addresses and slaughter all they find there, putting heads up on stakes outside the locations, with signs reading "AI pushers must die slowly and painfully".

3. Research various old school methods of removing annoyances, with special reference to the rack, breaking on the wheel, boiling in oil, and such. Have the AI produce images of these annoyance-breakers, using images of the executives as illustrations.

Let's see how fast you get removed...

FTC chair accuses Google of treating GOP's emails as spam

Re: PS

I still get such notices. Volkswagen Brandon, in Tampa. I'm literally on the other side of the state. I have never bought a VW. I have never been to the Volkswagen Brandon physical site. However, someone with an email similar to one of mine has a VW from them, and misses an awful lot of scheduled visits for various things, as the reminders come to me...

I have made repeated attempts to tell them that they have the wrong address. The emails stop for about six months, then start again. I made the mistake of calling them up; that stopped emails for nearly a year. Then they restarted, and I started getting texts. I have blocked them from my texts and put their address in a spam filter. A check with the spam folder shows email from them up to last month.

I get political email, including, for reasons known best to the idiot politicians in question, political email from politicians running for both national and local office in states ranging from Maine to Washington state. I'm in Flori-duh. I couldn't vote in Maine or Washington if I wanted to. Emails to the idiot politicians' offices do nothing. Actually calling the idiot politicians' offices merely adds me to their text lists. I have updated my block lists and spam lists. I had some spam yesterday from an idiot politician in Missouri who seems to be running for the state legislature. I'm not sure; I didn't read that far before nuking it.

Note that I have received snail mail from idiot politicians in Maine. One would think that perhaps someone would notice that the physical address is in Flori-duh, but apparently, Maine pols hire people who can't read.

Crypto thief earns additional prison time for assaulting witness

His name is 'St. Felix'. St. Felix from West Palm is either Haitan or Hispanic, probably Hispanic. Most of his crew, as. Noted in the full stories, are also Hispanic. The Orange One is much more likely to throw the book at brown or black gangstas. Nice white crackers, he'd pardon, but not Hispanics.

OneNote for Windows 10 support clock counts down

Re: I always wondered what OneNote was

You didn't miss anything.

All 12 users will be unhappy

see subject

Trump's gold-plated smartphone can't seem to decide which design to copy

Re: OEM identified based on specs?

It'll be difficult for it to be made in Chyna as she died nine years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chyna and she wasn't the Mango Mussolini's type, as she could have beat the crap out of him with one hand tied behind her back.

Microsoft crams Copilot AI directly into Excel cells

Ah. Thanks, MS

I finally have enough ammunition to remove Excel from all machines in the company. The beancounters had been growling whenever I wanted to make the network MS Office-free; they were the last holdouts, everyone else uses LibreOffice. They're about to get LibreOffice whether they like it or not, as a security measure. Copilot is a massive security hole and cannot be permitted on the network.

This also means fewer Windows boxes on the network. I had been keeping several Win10 machines to keep the beancounters happy, but now they'll be getting Ubuntu and like it. Win-win-win. Hoo-rah.

Thanks, Sad Nad. You've been a great help.

Browser wars are back, predicts Palo Alto, thanks to AI

I think

That I'll just stay with Firefox. Your company no like Firefox? No problem. I just won't do business with you.

I also think that I'll turn all AI off or just never get it in the first place. Your company no like no AI? No problem. I just wont do business with you.

And, yes, both of the above apply to my personal machines and to those company machines under my control. And I control all the IT stuff at the office. Some companies might not care about me individually. I suspect that they'll care a lot more about the company, given how much stuff we buy and sell.

As it is there will not be any Win11 machines, so no Copilot, and Apple Intelligence is turned off on all Apple devices. (Bloody hell, Copilot for iOS/iPadOS and possibly for Mac exists. Why in Christ Jesus's name would anyone install that on an Apple device? Not happening here. Oh, look, Edge for macOS/iOS/iPadOS exists. That's not being installed either.) ChatGPT is not installed. Ditto Gemini.

I can book my own appointments and whatever.

Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

Thou shalt read ALL the Sabrina Online strips

https://www.sabrina-online.com/archive.html

The very first strip (September 1996!) featured Eric Schwartz's obsessions with Amigas and skunks. He is still obsessed with both. Dangerously obsessed.

Are you willing to pay $100k a year per developer on AI?

I’m willing

to charge them $100,000 per dev for my data.

Windows 11 leads as October looms, but millions still cling to Windows 10

Bah, humbug

The machines running Win10 at the office will continue to run Win10 for a while. Over time the ones we want to keep will either be moved to Ubuntu or moved to a subnetwork which has no internet access and locked down thoroughly. New machines are either Macs or Ubuntu systems. Win11 will not be allowed on my network.

Fuck off, MS. And take your spyware with you. (Note: the Win10 systems are as spyware-free as we can make them. It’s just a lot more effort to de-spyware Win11 and we’re not even going to try.)

Oracle VirtualBox licensing tweak lies in wait for the unwary

Larry, m’man

Good luck billing me. I used a throw-away email address and fake info to access my VMWare 'evaluation' install... and after 60 days I junked it and went with a competitor. I got Oracle bumf on the throw-away email for a while, plus some spam, when the only place I had ever used that account was to get the download. I killed the account. Should Larry send a bill to that email, it will bounce, the email address doen't exist anymore, and the physical address listed is actually that of a motel on US 192 in Melbourne, Fl, where I once stayed one night too many.