Posts by WolfFan

Mark it in your diaries: 14 October 2025 is the end of Windows 10

And they won’t be seeing any money from me. Existing systems will either stay as is or get moved to Linux or just be retired and replaced with Linux or Mac systems. New systems will be built with Linux or will be Macs. Apple will just love this.

We've been shown time and again that strong encryption puts crims behind bars, so why do politicos hate it?

Re: Old encryption is returning?

You’ll just clog up the works. BoJo is far too large a load to flush. Someone will need to deploy a plunger.

The AN0M fake secure chat app may have been too clever for its own good

Re: AN0N, lots of fuzz about ?....

Mexico is in North America, not South America. Depending on your take on Central America, North America either ends at the southern Mexican border or the isthmus of Panama. North America also may/may not include assorted islands out to Greenland in the north and Trinidad in the south.

The Mexican cartels are just the latest in a long list of others, not least being the Jamaican yardies, assorted Columbians, Peruvians, Brazilians, and others. Previous versions also included various mobsters from the US and Russia.

'Condolences on the death of your conscience' says card from Indonesian delivery drivers to local Uber clone after payments slashed

Re: Good on them

The few times I take taxis, pricing is not a consideration. Reliability is.

Note that I rarely take taxis because the rates to get to where I need to go tend to be close to the cost of renting a cheap car. And the company will pay for the rental a lot faster than they will pay for the taxi. Yes, I often need to make long-distance road trips. The cost of going from Lake Worth to Hialeah by taxi is… interesting. Getting a clunker from Enterprise car rental, literally down the block from the office, is much more reasonable.

NTT slashes top execs’ pay as punishment for paying more than their share of $500-a-head meals with government officials

Re: Sushi + Saki + ...

Ahem. That’s the young girls wearing abbreviated sailor suits and not much else kept having to bend over’. And ‘chopstick’ is a funny name for what they were bending over. And it hadn’t fallen. Nope, nope, nope, not fallen at all.

There are those who say that I have a bad attitude. I can’t imagine where they got such an absurd idea.

BOFH: I'm so pleased to be on the call, Boss. No, of course this isn't a recording

Re: Underwear?

Kim Kardasian’s. It’s not like she ever used them.

UK Special Forces soldiers' personal data was floating around WhatsApp in a leaked Army spreadsheet

Re: Several thoughts

Oh, my. All Sgt Mjrs are polite, reserved, quiet, laid-back, surfer dudes. All of them. They would never let a word which could be considered impolite pass their lips. To suggest otherwise is just wrong. You’ll receive the Ultimate Punishment: you’ll be sent to bed without your supper.

Conservative Party fined one-third of a luxury food hamper by ICO for nuisance email campaign

So… why haven’t you got rid of Trump Mini yet?

First Forth, C and Python, now comp.lang.tcl latest Usenet programming forum nuked by Google Groups

Re: Denial of service attacks?

Ah… no, most newsgroups were not, and still are not, moderated. I waste time on multiple news groups, just one of which is moderated, and that’s moderated by a bot to kill cross-posts and a few other things. (No cross-posts to more than four groups, total; no cross-posts to more than two groups, total, if one includes certain specific groups; no cross-posts, period, to certain groups. This was aimed at a certain specific troll who got very upset when he couldn’t try to ignite flame wars with denizens of certain groups. He tried for years to get around the bot, but failed.)

Re: Ban Google

After a while I just nuked anything coming from Google Groups. No doubt this killed some good posts, but it killed _all_ of the GG-based spam.

Re: Newsreaders

In days past there were a number of Mac news clients. The best were NewWatcher and its descendants, Yet Another NewsWatcher, Multi-Thread NewsWatcher (YANW also was multi-threaded, but wasn’t quite as good at it) and (ahem) Thoth. (Brian Clarke swore that Thoth had been built from the ground up using original code, nothing borrowed from NewsWatcher, but it sure looked like YANW, which he had also done…) The NewsWatchers had excellent filters, especially MTNW; I used MTNW for a long time. They were free (except for Thoth) and after a while went out of support. (Thoth went out of support because Clarke had another of his patented hissy fits and rage-quit after yet another person asked just how much free, open source, NewsWatcher code was in Thoth. Who, me? Surely not.) The NewsWatchers were built using Apple’s Open Transport network stack, and all (including Thoth, imagine that) died when Open Transport with, I think OS X 10.7 or 8. MacSoup held on for a while longer, and Unison and Hogwasher and a few more came and mostly went; Unison is unsupported, the Hog didn’t work with some versions of OS X for a few years but does now, and most of the rest are dead. Thunderbird still lives, but TBird is a truly terrible news agent. The Hog is probably the best Mac news agent still supported, and its filtering simply isn’t nearly as good as MTNW from 20 years ago.

USB-C levels up and powers up to deliver 240W in upgraded power delivery spec

Re: USB confusion

Thanks anyway.

Re: USB confusion

Hmm. Do you have a URL for that? A quick look at the site doesn’t show it.

Royal Yacht Britannia's successor to cost about 1 North of England NHS IT consultancy framework

Re: Great British Engineering

Built in India, thank you. Probably designed there, too. Remember, India ‘s is now the #3 English-speaking navy in the world, and will catch up with and pass Britain for #2 shortly if HM Gov doesn’t get their fingers out.

Why did automakers stall while the PC supply chain coped with a surge? Because Big Tech got priority access

Re: Gartner

Hmm. I just replaced my phone. After six years. My main desktop at home is a 2012 Mac mini, the secondary desktop is a 2010 hand built, my laptop dates from 2014. At the office, most desktop and laptop systems are at least three years old. We usually don’t replace laptops until they are at least five years old, and desktop units may live for over a decade.

Of course, my car is a 2016 model.

I see no reason to buy new shiny just because it’s new shiny.

Just what is the poop capacity of an unladen sparrow? We ask because one got into the office and left quite a mess

Re: At KarMann, re: mosquito sizes.

Ahem. <Phil Sheridan> “If Satan owned Hell and Texas, he’d live in Hell and rent out Texas.” </Phil Sheridan>

Just in case it need be said, Little Phil was not a fan of Texas or Texans.

Microsoft hits Alt-F4 on Windows 10X: OS designed for dual-screen PCs axed

Re: Microsoft: it was way too good for us…

MacOS, capital M, refers to the classic Mac OS of the 1980s and 90s. macOS, lower case m, is what Apple is calling OS X and OS 11 now. The OP stated ‘MacOS’. He was incorrect.

Even if he actually meant macOS, he’s still wrong; the multiple monitor Mac Pro across the way from me right now has no problems displaying windows which reach over two monitors.

Consider yourself lucky to have not encountered the massive WinHype around the cloud of fast-evaporating vapor that was WinFS. IIRC it lived around the time of Vista, and trying to put it into Vista and then yanking it helped make Vista late and awful. It was supposed to be an all singing, all dancing, super file system. And then it suddenly wasn’t.

Errm… around here, people who use multiple monitors include:

* The Art Dept. They do things like sticking toolbars and such on one smaller monitor while doing actual work on the other.

* Accounting. They have monster spreadsheets which won’t fit onto one monitor unless it’s huge, and sometimes not even then.

* IT. Multiple monitors for remote ops, for server ops, the servers themselves may be headless, but server admin will have multiple monitors the better to keep straight which server they’re working with.

* Admin. Copying and pasting in multiple documents becomes much easier with two or more monitors.

Yes, they could use just one monitor, but that would hurt productivity. Monitors, even good monitors, are not as expensive as they used to be. Having space for them is now the critical problem.

Re: Microsoft: it was way too good for us…

A Mac IIfx didn’t run Mac OS? Really? What OS did it run, then?

Re: Microsoft: it was way too good for us…

Oh, really? Remembers the Mac IIfx with four displays from so long ago. Hmm. Which version of Windows was current then, and how well did it handle even one display?

Re: Locked down Windows

And right there was the kiss of death. Some of us go way, way, WAY out of our way to not use the MS Store.

iFixit slams Samsung's phone 'upcycling' scheme for falling short of what was promised

Re: "You buy a phone. Two years later, you buy another

Errm… I currently have two older phones sitting as spares which can be and are used as devices on my local network but not out of the house because their SIMs have moved to new phones: a iPhone SE, retired because it’s battery lasted for five years but now struggles to hold a change for a day, and a iPhone 6, even older than the SE and with a cracked screen. They still work as phones over the network thanks to Apple’s tech (maybe Android has something similar, I don’t know, I haven’t own anything Android in over a decade) and can do useful work, but they’re about six years old now. Without a SIM they’re useless outside of wireless range of the house, but still can receive and make calls as long as they’re in range. The new phones which replaced them, a iPhone SE2 and a iPhone 12, are noticeably superior in most respects, especially battery life. And are quite useful as emergency web devices, though I prefer a tablet or a real computer for that.

I use my phones and tablets until the batteries start giving trouble, then get a new one and park the old as a backup. This is being typed on an iPad Pro, the iPad 6 it replaced is a backup. It was down to 42% power this morning, I set it to charge, I must remember to unplug it.

Miscreants started scanning for Exchange Hafnium vulns five minutes after Microsoft told world about zero-days

Re: Hobson's choice then!

Hmm. We put the ADDS DC on one machine, stuff like DHCP, DNS, RRAS, on another, and Exchange, file services, database services, etc., on other machines. That’s other physical machines. There might be multiple file servers running in VMs, but on one or two or three (redundancy, y’know) different physical machines. None of which will be a DC.

Australian Federal Police hiring digital evidence retrieval specialists: Being a very good boy and paws required

Hmm. The Oz Federales currently have as many sniffer dogs as Hampshire County, West Virginia, Sheriff’s Office does. Hampshire County has a population of around 20,000. The Sheriff’s Office has about three dozen deputies, including the three dogs. It’s possible that Oz needs to wake up a bit.

Re: I've aways wondered...

That’s the canine equivalent of social media.

Fancy trying to explain Microsoft Teams to your parents? They may ask about the new Personal version

Re: How big a family

You’re obviously not Irish. Grandad #1 was one of 11 that lived, dad was one of 12. Grandad #2 was one of 10 that lived, mom was one of 7. I have a _lot_ of cousins. Thanks to the British military and the British Imperial civil service, we are all over the bloody world, from the frozen wasteland that is Canada (watch out for the Twin Terrors of the North: polar bears and the dreaded Canadian Arctic Attack Penguin) to desert wasteland that is Australia (drop bears, mate. And Really Big crocs.) to southern and eastern Africa (lions, wild dogs, hyenas, politicians even worse than those in Britain) to India (tigers. Annoying neighbors.) About the only way to get everyone together would be with something like this.

Microsoft sheds some light on perplexing Outlook blank email incident: Word was to blame

Not just Windows users

Recently I have had multiple alerts on Macs asking for, among other things, that the users reauthorize their accounts. One user had two O365 accounts, and both of them asked him to reauth twice each in the course of three hours. As one of his O365 accounts wasn’t ours, it’s not likely that it’s our problem. (The user was on his personal machine, connecting using MS Outlook. He also had several IMAP accounts on the same system, all of which worked properly.) Users on Windows had the blank email problem; one such user had the reauth problem as well. He was also on a personal machine. There may be a trend here. All users recently updated MS Office.

Your private data has been nabbed: Please update your life as soon as possible while we deflect responsibility

Re: Fake PII FTW.

Feh. Those who have no need to get my real PII get something from a list including various local Federal buildings (the FBI and the Federal courts tend to hang out there) or various local sheriffs’ office headquarters, or, if I’m feeling nasty, FBI HQ or Secret Service HQ in Washington. Complete with the appropriate phone numbers and the name of whoever was boss a decade or more prior but isn’t there anymore. (Certain local sheriffs aren’t available any more because they’re in prison, usually Federal prison, for being very naughty boys. And yes, they’re all boys. One local county has had two of the three prior sheriffs spend time in Club Fed.) Given that FBI HQ is located on a very famous street, one would think that using that address would be a dead giveaway. One would be wrong.

A nice throwaway email address, from Gmail or Zoho or Outlook or Hotmail or Yahoo or something is good for those kind of PII entries, too; create a throwaway with fake PII, answer their email, cancel the email. Or just abandon it and never use it again. (Some services, such as Zoho, want a phone number; there are lots of ways to generate a temporary phone number.) As I used fake info, Gmail et al can’t even complain to me. I’ve probably pissed Google off and they probably have noted my IP… except that I try to sign up from the local IHOP, using their extremely shitty wireless. Which I signed up for using a throwaway address and a spoofed MAC.

Generate a nice simple text file with the various fake PII, put the file on two or three encrypted USB sticks (NTFS EFS is good enough, and can be read by Windows, Mac, and even Linux, with the proper tools) and it’s portable, can’t easily be read by the ungodly, and keeps track of the fakes.

Google Docs users, you are on notice: Code rewrite may break browser extensions

Re: One browser to rule them all

I just don’t use GoogleDocs. Problem done.

Facebook: Nice iOS app of ours you have there, would be a shame if you had to pay for it

Re: temporary privacy addresses enabled by default for IPv6

Hmm. The device I rent from AT&T does IPv6, and has for years. Comcast around here also rent devices that do IPv6. Users can get rid of the Comcast devices for their own, Comcast doesn’t like it but can’t stop it. Unfortunately I can’t do that with AT&T, due to the way that tv, phone, and internet are managed by the AT&T device.

Should I be silly enough, I could even set up a local, in house, network using IPv6 instead of the 192.168.x.y IPv4 net the device uses by default.

Google will make you use two-step verification to login

Re: Another Attempt By Large Corporations To Erode Privacy

I find that entering 31 December 1969 when idiots who demand a birthdate can be quite useful. 16 July 1969 and 13 April 1970 work well, to. One of them is even two digits off from my real birthdate…

What about just plain Gmail?

Will that require 2FA as well? I foresee… problems… if so.

Ransomware crooks who broke into Merseyrail used director's email address to brag about it – report

Re: This does not affect the operation of our services,

The traibs might actually move.

Traffic lights, who needs 'em? Lucky Kentucky residents up in arms over first roundabout

Re: Er ...

France isn’t much liked.

Yankees and roundabouts

Do not mix well. Especially Johnny Reb Yankees, as found in Kentucky and, yes, here in Deepest South Florida. There are several roundabouts near me; each of them has skid marks and usually small amounts of broken glass and/or assorted car bits (side mirrors, whole or parts, random metal pieces, other stuff) because the locals simply have no idea of how to use them. The population of Cuban Cowboys and their sisters, Las Latinas Brava, here in Deepest South Florida who also don’t know how to deal with roundabouts but don’t care tends to make things even more interesting. They tend to care only about speed. One of Las Latinas Brava just managed to be clocked at 111 mph (not kph…) just before crashing into a pickup, totaling it, rolling her car, and killing one and injuring three… while being on probation after serving four of five years for vehicular homicide caused by speeding. Speed and roundabouts are an interesting combination. One of my nieces says that the Cuban Cowboys can drive sideways… just not at roundabouts.

Certain Caribbean ‘tourist’ destinations (Barbados and Jamaica, I’m looking at _you_) have roundabouts at the main entrance/exit to the big tourist airport (Grantly Adams in Barbados, Sangster in Jamaica; Norman Manley in Jamaica put the roundabouts at an extended distance. Grantly Adams has extra value thanks to all the roundabouts on the ABC Highway going into Bridgetown.) I call them tourist killers. It’s not helped by the fact that you’re supposed to drive on the correct side of the road in Barbados and Jamaica. Rent a car companies tend to have to repair a lot of vehicles.

Where meetings go to die: Microsoft Teams outage lets customers skip that collaboration call they've been dreading

Ah, so that’s what the problem was

I had a Teams meeting around that time. Certain people had significant problems getting and staying on, including the alleged instigator of the meeting, who tried four different devices before she could find one which would stay connected and have working audio and working video at the same time. (I had ‘video problems’ the entire meeting…) I love MS incompetence in things like this. Snide remarks about Zoom were made, not by me, I’m not that fond of Zoom either.

Apple's macOS Gatekeeper asleep on the job: Exploited flaw put users 'at grave risk' of malware infection

Re: Mavericks

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: macOS Sabretooth would have been awesome. And then there’s Cave Lion, Clouded Leopard, and, of course, Siberian Tiger. There are lots more cats out there. And if they start to run out for real, there’s always cat relatives, like, oh, Spotted Hyena, the most woke animal in Africa. (Hint: girl spotted hyenas are bigger, badder, and, umm, better equipped than guy spotted hyenas. Look it up.)

Banks across America test facial recognition cameras 'to spy on staff, customers'

Re: Tablet?

It’s about the size of the Prince of Wales’ left ear.

We've finally hit Peak Bork: Microsoft man reveals home-grown welcome back BSOD at Redmond HQ

Re: I dream of a good old fashioned BSOD...

MS simply cannot conceive of anyone willingly disconnecting from Ye InterTubes. Why, think of all that lovely telemetry which can’t be delivered if the network connection is down!

Re: Pointless?

OneDrive seems to have got new icons on both macOS and Windows. I have no idea when this happened, I just noticed this morning. Remote Desktop on both macOS and iPadOS has received multiple updates in the last month or two; the iPad version has had at least three updates in the last 10 days, including one which failed to install twice. Worked the third time. The other two were fixes for the one which had problems installing. (I sometimes have to remote in using the iPad. Remote Desktop works. Kinda.) The Patch Tuesday updates for Office on both macOS and iPadOS handed out slightly different icons for some documents, don’t know about on Windows, haven’t checked. The guys at MS seem to have a lot of time on their hands. One would think that they’d actually fix the damn OS, but no…

Exam-monitoring biz Proctorio tried to silence a critic using copyright law. Now EFF sues to put an end to this tactic

What UBC should do

Is pick up the legal costs in question. And sue the bastards for providing software unfit for purpose.

But can it run Avid? The Reg hands shiny new M1 MacBook to video production pro, who beats it with Blender, Handbrake, and ... Hypercard?

Re: Apple really has done an amazing job here...

HR does have Linux boxes. And Windows boxes. They are equally incompetent with both, but it’s easier to fix the Linux boxes and they don’t fall over because of yet another bad update. See, for example, the recent printing problems. HR prints a lot of stuff. Most of HR is working from home, and so are either printing remotely to one of the big copier/printers or to a local printer, usual their own as we didn’t have enough small printers to give one to each of them. After the Great I Can’t Print Event, there was much screaming from those using Windows, and nothing at all from those using Linux. Or Mac. Every time MS does something like this, we point out that non-Windows systems don’t have these problems.

Re: Apple really has done an amazing job here...

Oh, it’s not puzzling at all. The Windows fanbois get all butt-hurt when someone is less than complimentary towards their One Tru Luv. They are also too cowardly to post in support of their OTL.

Re: Apple really has done an amazing job here...

Someone thinks that MS _can_ keep Windows running reliably from week to week? Really? Quite a few of the machines around here run macOS or various Linux distros, mostly Ubuntu. The Windows systems are about 60% of the total, and require about 90% of the support. One particular box used to require almost daily messing about thanks to various problems with Windows… until I gave up and reimaged it with Ubuntu, and it has not needed attention since. It’s been two years.

I am not impressed with MS’s abilities with respect to making Windows stable. We use Windows because we have to, not because we like it. We don’t. Except, of course, for the fact that using Windows ensures that we will be employed into the foreseeable future, as someone has to fix the damn things.

Re: Incredible

That would be it.

Huawei wins big intellectual property case in Europe – against fashion house Chanel

Re: Quite apart from which...

And when Apple did get into music, one of their sound effects on Macs was Sosuemi…

Sucks to be you, any aliens living anywhere near Proxima Centauri's record-smashing solar flare

Re: they doubt the star provides the right conditions to support DNA-based life

Ah, yes. The Sunbeam. Some Boskonian loose planets just got vaporized.

Microsoft OneDrive for Windows 7 drives off a cliff for business users

Ok

So the web browser version still works, eh? No problem.

1. Move everything out of OneDrive using the web browser version.

2. Evaluate whether or not we actually need cloudy crap. If we do, get cloudy crap from DropBox or Apple or Google or… there’s a long, long list. Oh. Wait. We already have cloudy crap from two other vendors, explicitly to have multiple site backups so that one service going down doesn’t screw us over. And we have our own cloudy NAS.

3. Close down OneDrive on our systems.

4. Contact our lawyers to have a word with the Beast of Redmond re getting a refund for our not being able to use a part of our Office365 services. What’s that you say? Redmond won’t let go of the cash? Get stand-alone Office, cancel O365. Or just get a different office suite and live with the round trip issues. Tell the spreadsheet jockeys that they’re just going to have to suck it up and live without Excel. (Invest in lots of cattle prods and quicklime.)

5. Put serious thought into scrapping all Windows installs and going to just Linux and Apple. After all, we already have substantial numbers of both Linux (mostly Ubuntu) and Apple systems.

Cracked copies of Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop steal your session cookies, browser history, crypto-coins

Re: I can't think of any 'advanced' feature that's easier in LibreOffice.

Hmm… on a Mac, I can do it with Pages and, I think, Keynote. As I have dumped Adobe completely, I use non-Adobe applications to do that kind of thing if the form is too annoying to do in Pages.