Posts by WolfFan

LastOS slaps neon paint on Linux Mint and dares you to run Photoshop

Re: 1998

I last did a clean install of Windows (Win 10 Pro) on a laptop last week. The main problem was convincing the firmware to let it install; that problem would also have applied to Linux… except that there are no Linux drivers available for much of the hardware on that laptop. I checked with the vendor (Lenovo; I was directed to the ‘community’ wherein some said that Fedora might work but certain hardware, including but not limited to the fingerprint reader and the built in camera, would never work under Linux because there are no Linux drivers and never will be. Fedora doesn’t work. I tried. Twice. Win10 works, including all hardware. Don’t ask me why there aren’t Linux drivers for the frigging _camera_.) and I checked the wider Internet. No drivers for Linux. (If someone doubts, contact me directly and I will supply the specs.)

I put Win10 Pro on it precisely because I want to avoid MS screwing with the UI on a periodic basis; Win10 dies soon, and MS will LEAVE IT ALONE, something to be greatly desired. And no frigging Microsoft Account bullshit. Ever. I wanted to put Ubuntu on it, but… no drivers. And I can’t Hackingtosh it, because… no drivers. Win10 Pro is the best way forward. I just have to keep it well away from Ye Internet, and make sure that everything is backed up. Twice.

M&S warns of £300M dent in profits from cyberattack

Re: A £300million reduction in profits

No.

Re: A £300million reduction in profits

A lot less than £300 million.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Divers log

USS Kitty Hawk once made a run where if you took the distance travelled and divided by the time taken you got an averge speed of 45 knots; Enterprise CVN-65 was essentially a nuke Kitty Hawk and was, in theory, possibly as much as 5 knots faster than the non-nuke Kitty Hawks. (a.k.a 50 knots...)

The Kitty Hawks, like all American fleet aircraft carriers since the Forrestal class, are officially listed as having a top speed of ‘in excess of 30 knots’. No kidding.

Allegedly the Nimitz class were faster than the Kitty Hawk class, though not as fast as Enterprise, and the Gerald Fords are allegedly faster than the Nimitzes. They all are officially credited with ‘in excess of 30 knots’ and Unc Sugar’s Swabies get annoyed if youn try to probe more deeply. HMS Queen Liz is, allegedly, at least as fast as a Kitty Hawk.

Yeah, you could use a carrier as the World's Biggest Ski Boat. Don't tell the Orange One, he'll want a waterskiing vacation from cheating at golf.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: Linux alternatives

The GIMP is NOT a reasonable alternative to Photoshop. This amateur Photoshop user is quite able to find things that Photoshop does easily that the GIMP makes difficult when it can do them at all. Bloody hell, the GIMP has problems matching certain features of Graphic Converter, a small shareware (remember that?) image manipulation app which I’ve suuported since 1994 or 5. The GIMP has one advantage, and one only: it’s free. It has many disadvantages starting with its UI, which was bad in the first place and has become worse over time.

I have scrapped all things Adobe and now have assorted Affinity products. I have tried the GIMP… and have always removed it from the test machine because it stinks up the place.

Re: "Photoshop -> GIMP"

I quite agree.

Every time I see the GIMP being shown as a Photoshop replacement I laugh. The GIMP is NOT anything nearly sufficient to replace Photoshop. I have tried it, on Macs and Linux, for years. The UI sucks and has got _worse_ over time. It is missing tools which I, a very casual and totally not professional Photoshop user, rely on; I have see professional users attempt to use the GIMP, swear at it, and dig out an old copy of Photoshop or go and buy Affinity Photo instead. Affinity Photo manages to be a Photoshop replacement; it's not perfect, by any means, but it is far better than the GIMP. Pro users around here say that the GIMP is useless for real work.

Whenever I see someone advocate using the GIMP I tend to disregard any of their other opinions as the act of saying that the GIMP can replace Photoshop is sufficiently laughable to make anything else they say... questionable.

OS-busting bug so bad that Microsoft blocks Windows Insider release

Re: Where is the website suggesting more outlandish uses for AI ?

That's a plus for his kind of dolt.

Apple patched one first, but Microsoft’s blasted five exploited flaws this Pa-Tu

Who’s going to go first?

Given recent events, I will be holding back on patches until I see what this months Patch Tuesday breaks. It’s certain to break _something_, it’s bloody Microsoft, they’re incompetent, they have always been incompetent, and now they’re getting worse.

So… who’s volunteering to be the canary?

PowerSchool paid thieves to delete stolen student, teacher data. Looks like crooks lied

Wrong. They want to be Saudia, only more godly, which in this case means more utterly vile, something difficult to achieve given the vast strides Saudia has taken in that department.

Update turns Google Gemini into a prude, breaking apps for trauma survivors

Google says

If we can’t make money off you, we don’t give a fuck about you. MS will break stuff by accident, because they’re incompetent. Google will break stuff because it doesn’t pad the bottom line. And, yes, if you use a Google service that’s ‘free-to-you’, either it will be gone soon or Google is making money from it in other ways. There is no third choice.

Interesting note: I have DirectTV Streaming; certain people insisted that they couldn’t live without their tv fix, and comments about ‘a vast wasteland’ were met with hostile glares. (There was no way that I was getting a dish, given previous bad experience.) So there are four tvs attached to DirectTV Streaming, inbound using AT&T Fibre, nominally 1 Gb/s, not that we ever get even close to that. DirectTV Streaming uses Android devices with a lot of Google stuff, including voice control. Three of the devices have voice control turned off, one has it turned on. The device with voice control on is the only original device still operational; all the others have died and been replaced at least once, one of them twice. The one which was replaced twice is also the one on which almost all Google ‘optional features’ are turned off. Hmm. Co-incidence? Or Google handing out hints along the lines of ‘nice tv service you have there, it’d be a pity if there was a service interupption, now wouldn’t it?’ So far DirectTV is replacing devices for free under the warranty. (You have to use the serial number on the device to get a replacement, so it is clear which device failed.) We’ll see what happens later. I use the DirectTV app on my iPad, or log into the DirectTV site in a web browser on a computer, not a tv, on the rare occasions that I want to watch tv. No Google stuff in sight because I use Firefox, not Chrome… Google hates me. I don’t care.

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: rotating cat

Ahem. Housecats: nature's purrrfect snack.

Woof-woof-AAH-Woo! The wolves are among you!

Windows 11 24H2 now 'broadly available' ... complete with yet another 'known issue'

Re: One small consolation

Sad Nad’s Indian. He’s on the Deport to El Salvador list.

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

Re: Even more relevant

Feh. More like Fascist Italy II. Complete with an Il Douche.

Re: Even more relevant

Please. It’s not Trumpistan, it’s the Yuge, Nothing is Greater, Orange Not-Free-At-All State. (Until Canada and Greenland are conquered, That’ll be Greater Yet.)

I’m waiting for the proclamation that Afrikaans is the Official Language. And learning Xhosa. Bazingele phantsi!

Re: That UK Gov Manadate thing

Maybe someone didn’t think about where I got the ODF files in the first place?

Re: That UK Gov Manadate thing

I have been using LO on Macs for a Very Long Time, so I know that it’s there. It’s not there for iPad/iPhone, a.k.a. iDevices.

Collabra is not LO, and has... issues. Out of the box it doesn't talk to OneDrive, for instance. It talks to iCloud, GoogleDrive, and DropBox out of the box, so I'd say that not talking to OneDrive is deliberate. I have a significant number of files in various OneDrives. And, again, it's not LO. There is no LO for iOS/iPadOS. There is a viewer, with 'experimental' writing ability, for Android, but not for iOS/iPadOS.

Re: That UK Gov Manadate thing

LibreOffice, OpenOffice, etc., do not and probably never will have versions which will run on iDevices. I suspect a GPL or similar issue.

MS Office for iDevices will, in theory, open ODF documents. Actual experiments, including less than five minutes ago, indicate that there are… issues. I just attempted to open three different ODF format documents (one each in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word) and was informed that the documents can’t be opened because they are corrupted. The same documents open just fine in MS Office. When I first made the attempt, the documents were on a ‘personal’ OneDrive. Putting them on a ‘business’ OneDrive, on an Apple iCloud drive, and on a GoogleDrive made no difference. Storing the files on the local volume of the iPad being used for experimentation also made no difference. Trying a different iPad made no difference. They open in LibreOffice and in MS Office on Windows and Mac systems, no problems.

I suspect that MS is being MS again. My only question is whether it’s deliberate monkeying around, despite the existence of pages such as https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/view-opendocument-format-odf-files-in-office-for-ipad-and-office-for-iphone-150b8e56-051a-47de-bf58-1bbf828893fa which indicates that MS Office _should_ be able to open ODF files on iDevices, or just the usual MS incompetence showing up again, and that it's supposed to work but is just broken.

In the meantime there ain't no LO or OO on iDevices and almost certainly never will be, so... don't send ODF files to anyone who might read them on an iDevice.

I don't have an Android system handy to test. I bet that MS Office on Android won't work either. I have no idea if there are LO/OO versions for Android available.

Note that MS Office on iDevices will open PDFs, no problems, and will even handle older formats, such as .DOC and .RTF, again without problems.

Back online after 'catastrophic' attack, 4chan says it's too broke for good IT

Re: Morals

Attacking 4chan is trivially easy. They are so very naughty in so very many ways. Hmm. Kiddie porn... Hmm. Racist porn. Hmm. Facist porn... Hmm. Mass piracy...

They went out of their way to irritate a lot of people. One or more of those irritated did something to them. I suspect that whoever it was would have tried something, even if 4chan had had nice shiny new hardware and up-to-date software, it'd just have been harder to do. This is an absolutely classical example of Fuck Around and Find Out.

They should have come to me. I'd have built them a few servers, cheap. Well, not that cheap, but cheap enough. Cash in advance, though, I don't trust them.

Re: hacker using a UK IP address

I suspect that Ann Widdecombe hasn't a clue about where the 'on' switch on a computer is.

Scratch that. I suspect that Ann Widdecombe hasn't a clue, period.

Tesla fudged odometer to screw me out of warranty, Model Y owner claims

Re: Cockup?

Indiana wanted pi to be 4. Well, it's complicated. Indiana actually wanted to make the area of a circle of diameter d is equal to the area of a 'equitaleral rectangle', a.k.a. a square, with sides of length d. in order to get this, pi divided by 4 has to equal 1, so pi equals 4. The actual language of the bull in question never mentions pi. The nonsense was stopped when it was pointed out the state legislatures lack the ability to change mathematical concepts.

Indiana wants me, lord I can't go back there.

Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft. Readers say it's all been downhill since Clippy

Re: Microsoft isn't Windows anymore

It’s been true for a long time that MS makes its reputation on Windows, but its money with Office. (And now, Azure, etc.) This goes back to at least Office 2003. Possibly to 2000. It has been noted on El Reg that Peak MS OS was Windows 2000 Server. This is not a co-incidence.

MS is not alone in having peaked years ago; Peak MacOS was Snow Leopard; starting with Spastic House Cat, err, that is, ‘Lion’, it was a long slide downhill. (Who, me, hate Lion? Whatever gave you that idea?b Just because I was on AppleSeed while Lion was in beta and I spotted and reported several serious problems which were not fixed prior to release. Indeed, some of the problems weren’t fixed until much later; High Sierra for one particularly noxious example. There is one error still listed from Mountain Lion, where they fixed a lot of what was wrong in House Cat, in the little app Apple uses to send in bug reports as not having been fixed. I suspect that it will never be addressed. Every now and again I report it again because it’s till there in current versions of the OS. They’ve stopped acknowledging the reports, not even sending out the infamous ‘working as designed/intended’ reply, possibly because when they send that I reply “This is a piss-poor design and the intent is clearly to annoy users”, but then I have a bad attitude. I suspect “Won’t Fix” is in effect. Bah, humbug. I’ll report it again with the next version of the OS if it’s still there, which it will be.) Peak Linux depends on the distro; Ubuntu is well past its peak, to name one.

Samsung trumps USA's tariffs by making displays in Mexico, and elsewhere if needed

You can, of course, actually support this? USAID money was mostly spent in the US, the ‘aid’ packages were mostly dependant on purchasing American goods and services. In certain parts of the world (<cough> Jamaica, St. Lucia </cough>) USAID supplied American fertilizer to farmers, officially to grow bananas and coconuts. And then large American corporations, which owned plantations in Latin America that were larger than St. Lucia, and larger than the total land under cultivation for bananas in Jamaica (<cough> Chiquita </cough> used economies of scale to bring their prices down and when Britain and France declined to buy the cheaper bananas in large enough quantity because they had trade agreements with the Caribbean, why the the large American corporations used their leverage in Washington to lean on Britain and France to repudiate those agreements. And then theb farmers, about to starve because they couldn’t sell bananas, used their leverage USAID fertilizer to grow ganja instead. The profit on THC products was a lot better than the profit on bananas, especially thanks to the free fertilizer. Any bribing of local officials was done by the guys smuggling green leafy substances and white powders north and firearms south, not USAID. And, of course, by Chiquita in DC, but I expect that you weren’t thinking of bribery involving American officals, now were you? Thanks ever so much, Chiquita.

And after all that effort, the price of bananas is going to go up thanks to the Orange One’s tarrifs. The price of the green leafy substances and white powders will be unaffected by tarrifs as they don’t go past Customs unless the smugglers are stupid or amatuers. Can we have a 'hoo-rah for Donny'? It should be noted that ganja is easier to grow than bananas, so the farmers have stockpiled a lot of fertilizer, and even if the USAID fertilizer was cut off tomorrow would have at least two years worth of free fertilizer sitting around. And Britain and France are disinclined to pay attention to American trade complaints, and will be tarrifing right back, so the farmers could just go back to bananas for the European market if the ganja business dried up. Which is unlikely to happen. Let's have a second hoo-rah for Donny.

Do try and provide some evidence of USAID bribing local officials _outside of the US_, there's a good lad.

Amazing. It seems that you don’t seem to understand that while the US is a very big market, there are other big markets elsewhere in the world and China can just sell to them instead. Meanwhile, the US is sunk without certain imports, particularly raw materials and some agricultural products. For example, coffee is grown at a worth-while rate only in Hawaii in the US, and Kona coffee is rather expensive and a very small percentage of the coffee consumed in the US. Due to the way coffee is grown, you literally can’t grow it at scale anywhere else in the US. It can’t be done. If Brazil or Jamaica or whoever just slapped on a 100% tariff on coffee, the US would get to pay or live without coffee. There would be a freaking revolution if the coffee supply were cut off. As Jamaica doesn’t produce that much coffee, more than Hawaii but that’s not hard, to get cheap coffee the US would have to invade Brazil. Good luck with that. There’s a long list of agricultural products which are simply not grown in the US. Meanwhile, the primary US agricultural products are things like meat, especially beef, and grains, especially wheat and corn (maize). There’s a lot of cattle in Canada, Argentia, and Brazil, and lots and lots of wheat and other grains there too. Plus South Africa, and Kenya, and, to a lesser extent, Nigeria and India and Australia. Countries worldwide stop buying American anything, and farmers elsewhere rejoice while the American agricultural industry goes bankrupt. When the Orange Traitor hit USAID, it was the American farmer who suffered, to the tune of BILLIONS of dollars of lost sales. USAID was ALWAYS about subsidising American industries, especially American agriculture.

Follow the money, man. Or don’t, and take the consequences.

To avoid disaster-recovery disasters, learn from Reg readers' experiences

Re: The first thing I panic about... Yeah

And that is why you generate a new tape set every ever so often. And why you have a spare system and restore to it every ever so often. Yes, it costs more. It also actually works.

Re: Bombs too

It was, after all, a _remote_ package. The fire was in the exchange. It wasn’t remote, and therefore couldn’t activate the package. Union rules, y’know. Now, if the package had been installed next door, and the fire was over there, then it should have activated. Right?

2 in 5 techies quit over inflexible workplace policies

Re: If you can work remotely…

‘First generation’ immigrants and traffic, eh? Bullshit. As someone who has been in Nairobi and Kingston and Port of Spain traffic, I say unto thee that the average East African from Kenya or Tanzania or the average Caribbean migrant from Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, etc., has seen a lot more serious traffic than the average Briton on living in London. There’s a reason why some call Port of Spain ‘Port of Pain’. I still have nightmares about traffic on the Churchill-Roosevelt… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill%E2%80%93Roosevelt_Highway (Wiki says that it's 'often heavily congested'. No fucking kidding.) Even those who spent most of their lives in Deep Rural Kenya (that’s my early years) damn well know about traffic. It ain’t like in the movies or tv, boys’n’girls.

As Chromecast outage drags on, fix could be days to weeks away

Re: They forgot

Ah. Six downvotes, just one example. Gee. I wonder why that might be…

Apple hate. Just plain Apple hate, that’s all.

Re: They forgot

That’s _one_. M’man said ‘multiple’. I see three downvotes at this time, but just one example…

Typical of the Apple hate around here.

Re: They forgot

Cool. Please provide a few examples of that. Two or three should do.

Re: They forgot

Please provide a few examples of Apple devices borking due to expired certs. Two or three would do.

iRobot may be iDead in iYear

Re: Easy

Horses are notoriously easily frightened. Ride less scaredy-cat equines; some breeds of horses, particularly those descended from cavalry horses, and, of course, donkeys, mules, and zebras. Zebras don’t fear lions, much less itty-bitty robot vacuum-cleaners. They are, however, notoriously hard to tame. Mules and donkeys have been known to advance to the attack; they are often used to guard sheep herds (not shephards…) against wolves and coyotes as they _will_ attack annoying canines and smart canines see them coming and depart at high speed. Mules and donkeys, however, are notoriously unwilling to follow the commands of a mere bald ape just because said bald ape is sitting on their backs. Hmm. What to do, what to do… I know, get a big iRobot thingie and ride that. Think about it: it’ll increase their sales and save the company! And you can clean up leaves and debris as you go!

Eight days later, Microsoft Outlook users still struggle on iOS devices

Re: Dump Outlook and replace it

Thunderbird doesn't work on iOS.

Microsoft tells abandoned Publisher fans to just use Word and hope for the best

Re: I hate to say it, but Pages on Mac is great for this stuff

The web version is available for both Win and Lin. I have Web Pages running on this very Lenovo right now.

You can position one image using MS's positioning tools. One image per page. It will take time, but it will work. Go ahead, try to position two images on the same page. I'll be over there with a bowl of popcorn.

What I did was to just dump images in and leave them alone until I exported the Word document to a real layout application: QuirkXCess, NotDesign, or, now, Affinity Publisher. It just wasn't worth the time and effort to try.

It used to be much worse.

Re: Dusts off 33 MHz Quadra 650 shoved under bed

Quirk 3.x was incredibly buggy.

Re: I only use it once a year, but...

Tell Word that you're using a single tabloid page. That usually works, after you spend time positioning the image. Microsoft's image positioning tools are of little help.

Publisher was an abomination

Many years ago I worked in publishing, as the senior pre-press guy for a newspaper. The newspaper would do print jobs for outside clients, on our nice big web press, on newsprint, or, if the client paid enough, on glossy paper instead. We _hated_ Publisher. If a print job came in in Publisher format, we sent it back and told the client to resubmit in Word or PDF. Or a real publishing format, like PageMaker, QuarkXpress, or Adobe InDesign. Most professionals felt the same way. Publisher simply wasn't any good. To this day I use Publisher only to export Publisher files to a useful format. That loud 'Hooo-ray' you heard was publishing and printing pros world-wide expressing their delight at Publisher's demise.

Replacements for it, which would actually work?

1. Word. If you know what you're doing Word is an... okay... layout application. It is definitely lacking in many ways, but will work for most amateur requirements. Yes, you can lay out the double-page church notice poster, if you try; format the thing as a single-page tabloid document (other large page formats available) and print portrait to a printer capable of printing to tabloid (or whatever) pages. There are other ways to get the same general effect. It's not nearly as good as a real two-page layout, but it'll work. Just be careful with columns, and tables, and images.. Especially images. Microsoft has improved how Word handles images over the years. There was a LOT of room for improvement. There still is.

2. Pages. Pages is a much better layout app than Word. It's still not a pro layout tool, but it can be made to work much more easily than Word can. Apple ships Pages with every Mac and iDevice and the web version, which works in Windows and Linux, has most of the real app's features. It's not ideal, but it's better than Word. And it's free, unlike Word. (Well, free as long as you have a Mac or iDevice or an Apple account, anyway...) And it actually handles images in an almost acceptable way.

3. Affinity Publisher. The New Gold Standard. The reason why I bailed from InDesign (well, that, and Adobe were being greedy bastards, not that that's news). The full Affinity suite, Designer, Photo, and Publisher, is available for Mac, Windows, and iDevice for $165 (plus tax). That's a one-time payment of $165 (plus tax) for all three on all three platforms. https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher/#buy Affinity Publisher is very good indeed. Note that there is a try before you buy option.

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

i just had a little chat with Brother

The drone on the chat went on and on and on about the 'superior' quality of Brother supplies, totally ignoring me when I said that I used Brother supplies, I was just concerned about price increases. I suspect that I have made my last Brother purchase. Anyone know anything about the Canon MF653Cdw?

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

Re: All you need

I find your not bothering to address the non-availability of LO on iOS to be… interesting.

Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra, says Microsoft

MS performed a miracle

They created their own iPads and MacBooks, making them more expensive yet less functional than the Apple equivalent. I used to have a Surface Pro. It was slower, by side-by-side test than an iPad Air (not an iPad Pro, an Air...) when running things like MS Office. Seriously, the Air beat the Surface at playing with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Exactly how MS managed to do that when Office is an MS product, and one would think that they would know how to get the best performance out of them, is left as an exercise for the student. The Air also cost less and weighed less than the Surface, which, admittedly, did have better battery life. A MacBook Air crushed the Surface Laptop, and this time, the two products had similar battery life, so MS couldn't even claim that win. The MacBook Air was able to give a respectable time in playing with Access, despite having to have Access in a VM because Access can't access Apple products, mainly because Access stinks and the stink gets worse when compared to File Maker Pro. (File Maker Pro ain't the world's greatest software, but it's better than Access. Damning with faint praise though that may be.)

Now, if I spent some extra cash and got a fully tricked-out Surface Pro and compared it to an iPad Pro... the sonic bang you heard was the iPad Pro lapping the Surface. And the best Surface Laptop was cheaper than the best MacBook Pro, and it showed; the MacBook Pro obiliterated it. Seriously, running Office in a VM on the MacBook Pro was faster than running Office natively on the Surface Laptop.

My figures are from a few years ago. Perhaps the latest MS Surfaces are better. I might have a look if someone else provides the test machines, as I will not be purchasing MS Surface devices for myself, nor will the office be buying them for business use.

Microsoft tests 45% M365 price hikes in Asia-Pacific to see how much you enjoy AI

This morning I got a notification that my OneDrive was out of space. It appears that someone at MS finally noticed that they hadn’t been paid for accounts on the defunct site for nearly two years and turned stuff off; OneDrive is dead, two PDFs and a DOCX totalling 64 kB in size can’t be copied, moved, or opened; they were the only files in that OneDrive, and I have copies elsewhere (let’s hear it for USB thumb drives! Sneakernet forever!) and mail cannot be sent or recieved.

I have killed that OneDrive. The email lives only for archival purposes. Mail can still be accessed so I’m copying important stuff. When mailcan’t be accessed, the accounts will be deleted. I assume bthat the installers are dead.

If MS tries to raise prices for AI nonsense at work, I will kill all Office accounts.

I have not paid for MS Office since the days of Office 2003/2004 (Mac version). This is because I have been employed at various locations which provide MS Office to staff; I currently have two MS Office accounts for the full version ('Premium,' I think, but can't be arsed to check; the one with all the goodies including Publisher, now deceased, but not Visio or Project. I do have separate accounts for Visio and Project.) each of which can make four installs. For historical reasons, I have a third account, which is also free to me. I'm unsure if the installs from that account still work; OneDrive and email still work, but who knows about the rest. I mostly use LibreOffice and Apple iWork. Should MS raise the prices for MS Office, at least one of the locations will cancel all MS Office subscriptions; a now-defunct operation issued the historical account, and MS can't change the price; they no longer exist. I suspect that that account will go away once MS realizes it ain't get paid. OneDrive on that account is used just to transfer things, as the account might go bye-bye at any time; the email still works, but again, I suspect it might go away without warning. As it is, the only email on that account is spam.

What happens when someone subpoenas Cloudflare to unmask a blogger? This...

Re: First Amendment

Yes… with caveats wrt jurisdiction. In this case the defendant is in the US, so even if the plantiff is not there’s an, ahem, ‘jurisdictional nexus’. Note that there is... some argument as to the exact definition of 'jurisdictional nexus', and this case may add to the argument. Unleash the attack attorneys, and stand back out of blood splatter range. And get out the popcorn.

Database tables of student, teacher info stolen from PowerSchool in cyberattack

Sounds like they were violating FERPA

FERPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Educational_Rights_and_Privacy_Act has been around for literally 50 years. In order for one set of compromised credentials to access all of this info, FERPA was being violated big time in the course of their normal operations. FERPA is, of course, Federal. And even if it wasn’t, the fact that multiple states and multiple countries are involved would make it Federal.

There’s going to be blood…

Los Angeles wildfires force tens of thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

Re: Surely a benevolent god would have prevented the fire in the first place.

Do you know just how difficult it is to find sufficient virgins in _California_?!

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

Re: Really?

I suspect that one of copilot’s little friends played with his post.

Microsoft's spat with ValueLicensing limps toward 2026 showdown

Re: Microsoft : "Helping our customers move to the cloud improves productivity and security."

Not so that anyone outside of Washington state would notice.

Microsoft adds another problem to the Windows 11 24H2 naughty list

Danger, Will Robinson

1. For reasons of Lenovo, Lenovo has been shipping most (all?) of their laptops with BitLocker turned on for some time now. Whichever account is used to set the laptop up is the BitLocker account, with the BitLocker key. Do not lose it or you're fucked. This laptop has two fingers set up for the fingerprint reader, a six-digit PIN, and a 15-character passphrase. Yes, it was annoying to set all that up.

2. For reasons of I'm bloody paranoid, the very first thing that I do is record in my little notebook and in my spreadsheet (the notebook is stored in a locked drawer in a fire-resistant file cabinet, and the spreadsheet is NOT stored on the laptop or on anything cloudy) and the second thing is to make a FULL backup of EVERYTHING on the new device, BEFORE performing any updates of any kind whatsoever. (The backup goes into the file cabinet as well). I also generate an external Windows install media setup on a USB thumb drive; if absolutely necessary, I can nuke and pave and then run a full restore. I also generate an Ubuntu install USB, if Windows gives me backchat then Ubuntu goes on the system. Yes, I turn on full access to the BIOS/UEFI and ensure that Secure Boot is unlockable just in case SB gets annoying about Ubuntu. I use Acronis for backup, so I have another USB drive with an Acronis emergency boot setup. Thumb drives are cheap and plentiful.

3. For reasons of Lenovo is full of it, I am VERY hesitant about installing Lenovo 'updates'. Lenovo is bad, but they're better than HP or (ick) Dell, so I put up with them. There are currently two Lenovo 'updates' available for this laptop. I'll get around to installing them, one at a time, probably before the end of the year. Or maybe not.