Posts by WolfFan

Macs to Linux fans: Stop right there, Penguinista scum, that's not macOS. Go on, git outta here

Re: Look before you leap!

You’re not the first to point that out. The wild tuxers infesting this forum simply don’t care. They will go on and on bashing Apple because obviously Apple is at least as evil as Microsoft or Google.

Re: Let not the truth get in the way of a good hatchet job

It’s el Reg. They hate Apple.and have for a very long time.

Stairway to edam: Swiss bloke blasts roquefort his cheese, thinks Led Zep might make it tastier

Back when he was still married to Diana?

ZX Spectrum reboot scandal man sits on Steve Bannon design tech shindig committee

I see that the serial downvoter is alive and well...

I would invite him to a landfill. And leave him there.

Google logins make JavaScript mandatory, Huawei China spy shock, Mac malware, Iran gets new Stuxnet, and more

Re: "uranium subterfuges", O Joy

'Tequila', eh? So you're saying that the Trumpanzee is correct to blame the Mexicans for, well, everything?

Vlad disapproves, too. You should be drinking vodka. Russian-made vodka, of course, so that the Shirtless One can get his rake-off... ah, 'taxes and duties', that is.

Re: So not, Google

Google ate my gmail account recently. I was told that they "could not verify" that I was the "owner of the account". Basically, I had that account since 2005 and very rarely logged in using the web interface. This last time I tried to set it up using MS Outlook. Apparently Google really hates it when they can't get all the info they want.

I'm now, temporarily, on Zoho. I will have my very own domain with its very own email shortly.

And I use DuckDuckGo and usually have JavaScript turned off. Bite me, Google.

Nikola Tesla's greatest challenge: He could measure electricity but not stupidity

"women are sadly underrepresented on bank notes"

Oh? Really? I haven't been in the UK in <mumble> years, but when I was last there I seemed to see that pretty much every bank note had a pic of a certain person named 'Elizabeth' on them. Is s/he not a woman? And if not, has anyone notified Phil the Greek that he's married to a guy? He is a sailor as well as being a Danish/German Greek, and so might not have noticed.

This one weird trick turns your Google Home Hub into a doorstop

Page or Brin?

Both. They’re too bloody cheap to get more than one account, and are too arrogant to realise that accounts are free, so they share one.

Leaked memo: No internet until you clean your bathroom, Ecuador told Julian Assange

After trials, of course

He's flat-out guilty of bail jumping. He'll be in rent-free accommodation while being tried for that, slightly different rent-free accommodation for a while (3 months? 6 months? A year? Something like that) after being found guilty, then he'll be in rent-free accommodation in Sweden until his trial there. No-one is gonna let him out on bail again, he's the definition of 'flight risk'. Even if found 'not guilty' in Sweden (it is to laugh...) he's looking at months to years in rent-free government accommodations. Not quite up to the standards of his current rent-free government accommodations, to be sure, but rent-free government accommodations none the less. And, guilty or not guilty, the Swedes will almost certainly put him on an aircraft to Oz when they're done with him. If the US wants him (not likely), there will be an extradition request waiting on him as he steps off the aircraft, and he'll be on another aircraft bound for more rent-free government accommodations while he awaits trial in the Federal system. Which is severely backlogged, so he'll be waiting for quite some time. If the Feds wanted to be cruel, which is what the Feds do best, they'd keep him parked in some county sheriff's stockade awaiting trial right up to the limits allowed under 'speedy trial' laws, and then cut him loose. And deport his ass to Ecuador. He is, after all, an Ecuadorian citizen.

dumping Julie on another embassy

I'm sure that the various Nordic countries, with their proud traditions of granting asylum, would be happy to help. Hmm. Norway. Denmark. Finland. Sweden. Oh. Wait. Possibly not Sweden.

Or perhaps, oh, Australia.

Cabinet Office: Forget about Verify – look at our 3,000 designers (and 56 meetups)

Re: You've lost me at B Ark.

StuntMisanthrope, your real name is Lola and you have a dark brown voice and drink champagne which tastes like cherry cola.

That 'Surface will die in 2019' prediction is still a goer, says soothsayer

Really?

And Microsoft's killing Surface won't push lots of former Surface users into Apple's delighted arms? I can see it now: Tim Cook extending a warm welcome to the Surface refugees. "We think different"(1), he says. "We won't shaft you the way that Microsoft just did (2). And we're cheaper than Surface (3). And we don't spy on you the way Microsoft did(4)."

(1) "We make money on hardware."

(2) "We'll shaft you in a different way."

(3) "Amazing, isn't it? They really were more expensive than we were. We gotta raise prices."

(4) "We don't care that much, and, besides, we can easily get the info we actually want without going to their extremes."

Take my advice: The only safe ID is a fake ID

Re: A different name for every site?

You would end up with sons called "Opening Batsman" and daughters called "Big Tits"

And this would be a problem, why, exactly?

Re: Silly first name.

Alexander maybe properly Eskandar?

Only if you're aboard the Argo/Yamato trying to save Earth/Japan from the villainous Gamilons/Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Blazers

(For just how crazy the original idea was, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ten-Go)

Pixel 3, 3XL, Slate tab launch: Google emits swanky iPad botherer while tarting up mobes

errmm...

The _base model_ is $599. That gives 32 or 64 GB SSD (https://store.google.com/product/pixel_slate_specs isn't clear). The base iPad 6th generation is $329. $559 ($40 less than the base Pixel Slate) gets you 128 GB storage and both wifi and cellular. Yes, the Pixel Slate has an Intel processor instead of an ARM processor, but it's a _Celeron_. If I want a portable device with a Celeron, Dell has swarms of them in the $250-350 range. (No, I don't want a portable device with a Celeron...) And it doesn't have cellular connections, or at least the product specs page doesn't show it if it does. I use my iPad with a cellular connection (T-Mobile) a lot more than I use the wifi connection. My iPad has 128 GB storage. The Slate with 128 costs $999, or $450 more than my iPad, also known as enough to buy one of those Dell laptops. And have change. One of the things I use my iPad for is to tether my (elderly) laptop, which has a (older) i7 and which cost $700 when it was new. To get an i7 I'd need to spend $1599 on a Slate, and would still need something to connect to a cellular net, or be forced to use 3rd-party, untrustworthy, wifi. And a i7 Slate would have 256 GB storage, where my laptop has 1 TB. Why on Earth would I be interested in buying a Slate?

And one more thing: to ask the question posed in El Reg's comments section about certain Microsoft products: can I reformat it and put a Linux distro of my choice on it? I can't do that with my iPad, of course, but I can do it with my laptop. After certain recent revelations about Google, I am quite reluctant to use either Android or Chrome OS.

Google now minus Google Plus: Social mini-network faces axe in data leak bug drama

Re: To be replaced by...

Too late. G++ is already a thing, and there would be massive confusion.

Re: Whoops.

But will they ever get over her being from Yorkshire?

Could be worse. Could be Scots.

Hmmm.... translation, please?

Re: Presumably Google have enough metadata

They know what really happened at a certain party in the early 1980s involving a [racist stereotype] drunk Irishman.

Brit startup plans fusion-powered missions to the stars

Re: Interstellar fuel

That’s been thought of, by writers as varied as Aurthur C Clarke and Lois McMaster Bujold, passing through certain stories.

'Incommunicado' Assange anoints new WikiLeaks editor in chief

How to leave an embassy

I have a solution to the problem.

1 the Ecuadorians tell St. Julie the Ass that they have a way of getting him out of the embassy without being arrested by HM Gov. It involves the co-operation of the Brazilians. Basically, the Brazilian navy, as part of the first shakedown cruise of their new fleet flagship, PHM Atlântico nee HMS Ocean, will send a helicopter to winch him up from the balcony and fly him to the assault ship. He will then have a nice sea cruise back to Brazil and will be turned loose in Rio, hopefully in time for Carnival next year. I'm sure that St. Julie would particularly like the thought of using an ex-British ship to evade getting his collar felt by PC Plod.

2 at the appointed time a SH-70 Seahawk helo in Brazilian colours arrives over the embassy and St. Julie is winched up, to be greeted in Portuguese. The helo flies on out towards the Channel, where it sets down on a large amphibious assault ship flying the Brazilian naval jack.

3 as soon as St. Julie sets foot on deck, he is arrested by some US Marines, the Brazilian jack goes down and the US Navy's jack goes up, and a large decal on the SH-70 is removed to reveal US Navy markings.

4 St. Julie enjoys a nice sea cruise to the Caribbean. After a stay in south eastern Cuba, he is handed back to HM Gov, and after a stay in the finest gray-bar hotel in Britain, to the Swedes, who can now use him for his finest purpose: polar bear bait.

Ecuador and Brazil get some nice presents for their trouble. The poor bears might get indigestion.

Amazon Alexa outage: Voice-activated devices are down in UK and beyond

All Greek to me

Alexa is derived from Alexander/Alexandra, Greek or near-Greek names which can be translated into Ye Queene’s English as meaning ‘defender of men’ or ‘repeller of men’, depending on context. Works for me. I’m repelled.

Brexit campaigner AggregateIQ challenges UK's first GDPR notice

Serious question but how are the ICO going to enforce the GDPR against a Canadian company?

Assuming Canada wants to trade with the Eu in future - quite easily.

Oh? The ICO is going to take the whole of Canada to task over the action of one company? Really? And when the Canadian PM tells the Canadian High Commissioner in London to have a polite (they're Canadians, they're always polite, even when they're telling you to rotate on a cactus) word with the MayBot, about what Canada will or will not buy from Britain if the ICO takes any action at all against the whole country for the actions of a single company, what do you really think the MayBot will do? Back the ICO, or ruin the relationship with one of the pillars of the Commonwealth? Things will get awfully lonely after Brexit...

how are the ICO going to enforce the GDPR against a Canadian company?

The only way that they could do anything would be if the company, from any jurisdiction outside the EU, had assets inside the EU. If the company, any company, does not have assets inside the EU there is absolutely nothing they can do unless and until the company, any company, either has assets inside the EU or does business with some entity inside the EU.

In this case the company is Canadian and does not seem to have assets inside the EU and is not currently doing business with any entity within the EU. The ICO has zero leverage. They cannot compel the Canadian courts to do anything, which means that they cannot enforce the fine, or, indeed, anything whatsoever. Our Canadian heroes could, if they so wished, stand on a ship outside of the territorial waters of any EU country and make remarks about farting in the ICO's general direction and about how the parents of the ICO rep were funny-smelling rodents, and there would be nothing that the ICO could do about it.

I suspect that I see the reason why the ICO failed to mention this (non)action.

As one Microsoft Windows product hauls itself out of the grave, others tumble in

Re: Wait until the last sentence

Of course they are. It took 'em literal decades to get close to what Apple had since day 1 on Macs (hint: command-shift-3 for the entire screen and command-shift-4 for a window, with really difficult to learn sub commands like hitting the spacebar to select a specific window) and so they must tweak it. And break it. Because they're bloody Microsoft, and the'M' stands for 'Mighty' and the 'i' stands for 'incompetent'. Three guesses as to what the 'c' stands for.

Juniper's Contrail gets edgy, Cloudflare joins BGP club, and an $Important announcement

Hmmm

Isn’t a ‘layer 1 switch’ kinda-sorta a, umm, hub? Hubs are a big deal for some reason?

Guilty: The Romanian ransomware mastermind who infected Trump inauguration CCTV cams

Re: "ensured that the surveillance camera system was operational prior to the Inauguration"

You have a Negative Attitude. It’s not their hoods which are pointed, it’s their heads.

Re: They could have swapped the Inauguration footage for the Mickey Mouse show

The Walt Disney Corporation would have noticed. And shortly after that, their lawyers would have been deployed. Some of the more friendly and cuddly lawyers had small parts in various Disney movies, notably “Finding Nemo”. They would be the ones with all the teeth.

Microsoft: Like the Borg, we want to absorb all the world's biz computers

Highly objectionable pic

The Borg Queen is retired and currently owns a very bad basketball team. And that pic makes her look almost human.

Microsoft pulls plug on IPv6-only Wi-Fi network over borked VPN fears

Re: Shame!

I have never had a Facebook account. I used to have a Gmail account. Google got into a hissy fit ‘cause I insisted on using ‘insecure’ (that would non-Google-controlled) metholds of accessing my mail and ‘could not verify that the account belongs to you.” I killed all things Google, down to DNS, on all my systems. Google can bite me.

He says "We need to start shaming. Shame! Shame! Shame!"

Really? I never heard of 'Lasse Haugen' before. Why should I, or anyone else, give a damn about his opinion?

I have IPv6 set up on my home router, as my ISP put in the necessary infrastructure several years ago. I have IPv6 set up on my cellphones; both my cellcos put in the necessary infrastructure years ago. 90+% of my connections on my cellphones and on my home router are IPv4. THERE IS EFFECTIVELY NOTHING TO CONNECT TO. Why should BigCorp (or even El Reg) go to the trouble of setting up IPv6 when no-one, outside of a few neckbeards, give a flying fuck at a rolling donut on the deck of a tanker in a thundering typhoon about IPv6? Setting up IPv6 costs money and takes time. Why do it unless there's a reason? IPv4 appears to be working well enough, and as almost everyone is using IPv4, anyone who goes with IPv6 will have to dual-stack until such a time as enough people move to IPv6 to make it worth while to kill the IPv4 stack. Who's gonna pay for that? Lasse Haugen?

Google keeps tracking you even when you specifically tell it not to: Maps, Search won't take no for an answer

Re: It's really not that complicated

“Russian bribes” I’m in favor of; bribe me, Vlad, bribe me, I’ll take all the cash you send my way. US dollars or GBP only, please. Russian brides, now, some of those cows make dear old Sister Mary Hildegarde look good, even with her mustache and steel ruler. (For those who may have escaped Catholic school, Sister Mary Hildegarde and her accomplices could and would make Marine drill instructors look like Pinky Pie.)

Re: Google takes revenge

I used to - note the past tense - use a Gmail account as my El Reg ID. last week I attempted to use my MS Outlook app on my laptop to read that account. Apparently MS Outlook is ‘not secure’ and my account was locked out because ‘Google could not verify that you are the owner of this account’. My major crime appears to have failed to log in to the web interface for several years, having set up IMAP for the account and exclusively using ‘insecure’ apps such as Thunderbird, MS Outlook, and Apple Mail rather than the superior, and ad-ridden and/or location-blabbing Google products.

I now have a Zoho account, and all who I know who have (had) Gmail accounts are switching to Zoho or similar. Because I had set up IMAP, I can retrieve mail prior to Google’s hissy fit. This account was a throwaway for use with web fora, so it didn’t get much mail in the first place, mostly password reset messages and such. I’ve changed all the fora which used to use this account. Say buh-bye, now...

Microsoft: You don't want to use Edge? Are you sure? Really sure?

Re: Not just Edge

Doing that means adding a layer of operations. If I want to run one of the apps which requires Windows, I must first load the VM. Most VMs do pass-through for peripherals. One problem is Linux can't talk to certain hardware because there are no Linux drivers for it. This includes a $150,000 device. We are not going to buy a new device until the old one, currently nearly 20 years old, croaks. It doesn't talk to Linux. It does talk to Windows. (And Mac) Linux can't do the pass-through thing because Linux doesn't know that the device exists., when it was new no-one thought of doing Linux drivers for it. Yes, we are looking to replace it, it won't live forever. No, it still works and as long as it does, no we won't abandon it. (and spend another $150,000 to replace it, prices have NOT come down, there are fewer vendors now and less choice which means the demand is still there but the supply is limited and the vendors can charge what they want and know we must pay. Which is another reason why we hang onto this one like grim death.)

It's not happening. Linux-based systems cannot do the required job. Windows (and Mac) systems can. It is simpler to just use Windows (or Mac). Period. End of story. Except that it's not 'legacy cruft', it's 'stuff that keeps us in business'.

Re: Not just Edge

Because certain apps I must use for work do not run on Linux. Because certain hardware I must use does not have Linux drivers. Because, while I use LibreOffice for most most office-type work, some word processor and spreadsheet files break if not run past MS Office. In particular LibreOffice has serious problems with complex tables while Word and Excel handle them without problems and have handled them since the 1980s. It’s not bloody rocket science, but LibreOffice and OpenOffice before it simply can’t hack it, and until LO or OO can hack it I must have MS Office. Which does not run in Linux. I could run a VM, but that’s just running Windows anyway. I could run WINE, but some of the required apps and drivers don’t play well with WINE. It’s simpler to just run Windows.

Re: Not just Edge

Try to not let your Microsoft hatred run away with you. On my Win10 laptop, I have DOC, DOCX, and RTF set to open in LibreOfiice, as well as EPUB set to open in Caliber’s ebook reader. That would be three Microsoft formats and the very format you used as an example of what can’t be done. And, yes, MS Office is installed, it’s merely not the default. I also have Firefox set as the default web browser, even though Edge is installed, VLC does videos, and the GIMP handles pix, despite multiple image-handling apps shipping with the OS. Last I looked, LibreOffice, Firefox, VLC, and the GIMP didn’t ship via Microsoft’s store. Seriously, man, get a grip.

Sextortion scum armed with leaked credentials are persistent pests

Re: They're using webmail accounts

I had (note past tense) a gmail account. I had a Yahoo acount, also past tense. I still have an outlook.com account. I very, very, VERY rarely connected to those accounts via a web browser; this may well have been the real reason why Google “could not verify” my now dead gmail account. I used IMAP for gmail and still do for outlook; yahoo, who were living in a dream world, wanted me to pay them to use IMAP, but POP was free. I gave each of them as little info as possible. (Another possible reason why Google “could not verify”) Some providers demand a physical address, but they don’t seem to actually check the address provided; 935 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, DC, works quite well. Even if it does evoke images of men in tutus and feathered boas.

I detest webmail and decline to use it unless I absolutely have no choice, and I almost always have a choice. And where I must use webmail, the info provided is usually... massaged, shall we say.

Re: The consequences can be tragic

It seems that I have acquired a little friend.

Re: The consequences can be tragic

They put a big ugly pop-up yammering something about cookies. I closed the window.

Re: Why me?

I've lost count of the number I got, all quoting the same password I used only to access Adobe's crap many years ago. It was last used with Creative Suite 5.5, which tells you the age and where they probably got it from.

That particular address was a gmail address. I killed it, and everything else I had which came from Google, after Google 'could not verify' that the address I used to use as a throwaway address for contacting things like El Reg's comments section. Very little traffic came to either of the two gmail addresses. except for spam. There was lots of spam. Now that I've dumped gmail, the spam count, and the attempted sextortion count, is way down.

I quite like the thought of Google's servers slowly filling up with spam addressed to me...

As for the sextortion twits... publish and be damned to you. Except that given that they've been trying this on for over a year now, I suspect that they have nothing to publish. Actually, I suspected that from the beginning.

make all relocate... Linux kernel dev summit shifts to Scotland – to fit Torvald's holiday plans

Re: Compromise: meet in New Edinburgh

Only the suicidial go to Ottawa in October. And if you by accident find yourself there and aren’t suicidial, don’t worry, it’s n less than 48 hours you will be.

Yes, I did spend what seemed like a month but was only three days in Ottawa, once. Given the choice I’d pick Hull.

Google is 20, Chrome is 10, and Microsoft would rather ignore the Nokia deal's 5th birthday

Re: Saints and fools

Seems that there are at least two Trumpkins infesting El Reg's comments section. Sad.

Re: Saints and fools

Compared to the Trumpanzee, MayNot, CorByMe, and even Johnny-Come-Never are bloody saints.

VMware 'pressured' hotel to shut down tech event close to VMworld, IGEL sues resort giant

Hull?

Heavens no. Somewhere fun. Somewhere warm. Somewhere scenic. (None of which applies to Hull)

Hmm... Negril, Jamaica.

Won’t patch systems? Never run malware scans? Welcome to the US State Department!

Re: The real question

He's a government employee. If the brass pretends to pay them, and the brass does exactly that, they will pretend to work, and they do exactly that. This was the problem with the old Soviet Union: they were all government employees.

Nork hackers Lazarus brought back to life by AppleJeus to infect Macs for the first time

Re: Trojans, again

When its a trojan pretending to be a legit trading app, yes you have to hunt it down and install it yourself. There might be some spam promos roaming about, but by this time most email services filter out most spam.

Trojans, again

And once again this is a trojan. The user must locate, download, and install the software in the first place, right? I just Googled 'Celas Trade Pro'. The fourth hit was a Securelist page about AppleJesus. The third was an ITWire page about the Lazarus group and bank hacking, and the first two were links to Celas LLC. The first 10 hits on DuckDuckGo were to news stories about how Celas Trade Pro was a trojan. Over at Bing, the first hit (an ad) was for E*Trade, but the rest of the first 10 hits were quite similar to the results from DuckDuckGo. At Yahoo, the first two hits were ads (E*Trade and Amazon, apparently you can get anything at Amazon, according to Yahoo) but the rest of the top ten were similar to DuckDuckGo and Bing. It seems that it might be a good idea to avoid Google and Yahoo, but most commentards already know that.

Foreshadow and Intel SGX software attestation: 'The whole trust model collapses'

Re: DRM was dead a hundred years ago

Four examples of DRM which didn't work very well have stuck with me for decades now.

1 More than 30 years ago, there was a game [name redacted 'cause the twat who thought it up is still around and he was pretentious then and is probably worse, and quick on the lawyer-launch button, now] which like all games of the time, shipped on floppy. I, not knowing then what I was soon to discover, purchased a copy of the game, and the first thing I did was to copy it from the floppy to my computer's (brand new, and very expensive) 40 MB (so much space! I could never fill all of that up!) hard drive. I then launched the game... and the computer crashed. I restarted, launched again... and the computer crashed again. The next time I rebooted, I had the game floppy in the drive, and the computer booted from the floppy, not my hard drive. It booted directly to the game. No crashes. A little experiment showed that the game would crash the computer every time unless it was launched from the floppy. I wrote to the game vendors; they sent back a mimeographed copy of a 9-pin dot-matrix original document lamenting that people would steal their Work of Art(tm) if it wasn't copy-protected. In the meantime, I had discovered two things: (a) several commercially available bit-copy utilities would make perfect copies of the Work of Art(tm) and (b) at least two commercially available utilities would would fake 'load' the floppy well enough to let me play the game. The vendors deliberately and with malice aforethought set up DRM which would crash my computer if the game was played from a hard drive, risking damaging my file system, did not warn me on the packaging or in the notes or anywhere at all that they were doing this... and were incompetent in the process, using easily circumvented methods. They offered to sell me a 'back-up' floppy for the low, low, LOW price of only $10 (the game cost $40 in the first place). I wrote back, stating that I already had two 'back-up copies', and that I would assist them in their desire to prevent their products being run from my hard drive by never again purchasing anything from them. They were upset and threatened to sue me for all kinds of things. I told 'em to bring it. Never heard from them again.

2 related to above. This time the game came on a CD, and would not play unless the CD was in the CD drive. Making a regular copy of the CD didn't work. Again, using a commercially available bit-copier to generate a disc image and then burning the image did work. Again, using a commercially-available utility to mount the image also worked.

3 another game. This time it shipped with an actual manual, on pink paper with some words in pink ink which was human-readable, but which ordinary photocopiers couldn't read. The idea was that the game could be copied, but the manual couldn't, and every now and again users had to enter something specific from the manual. I had access to a very high end 48-bit scanner. It had no problem scanning the manual. One quick application of Photoshop later, the pages were no longer pink and the the words weren't, either.

4 yet another game. (you may be detecting a trend...) This one required that users enter a license key in to play. The problem is, the guys who wrote it were incompetent. The key was not saved. Users had to enter it again every time they played, usually by copying and pasting the key from somewhere else. This meant that the key was saved in a TXT file... which could be, and was, handed around with the installer for the game. One reason why this was so was that the developers flat out refused to reply to anyone (me) who reported the key save bug, even if the user (me) had got the game direct from the developer's own site, had set up an account on the site, and had paid and received a receipt for the game. They also never notified registered users (me) of any updates. They simply didn't give a fuck about users once they had their money. The result was that users didn't give a fuck about them and passed copies of the game and keys around freely. I, personally, never handed out my key, but I was able to get hold of no less than five other keys for multiple versions of the game. (Remember, they didn't notify anyone about updates. And the key worked, if you could call it that, with just one version. They wanted users to pay full price for all updates, no matter how trivial, and never, ever, fixed the key bug.)

You: 'Alexa, open Cortana.' Alexa: 'Who?'

Bah. Humbug.

I have several Apple devices. I have turned Siri off on all iOS devices and have physically deleted the Siri app from all macOS devices. (I had to disable certain 'security' features to do that, but I was going to disable them anyway because my idea of security and Apple's idea of security seem to have diverged quite some time ago.)

I have several Windows devices running Win 10. I have deleted Cortana from all such devices, and it was a pain doing it, and I have to do it again every time there's a major 'update'. (Here's how to delete: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3109900/software/you-can-remove-cortana-from-windows-10-but-its-tricky.html)

I have no Echo, Google Assistant, or Bixby devices and I never will.