Didn't Amazon consider that, until Bezos received a nice phone call from the Orange In Chief?
Posts by FrogsAndChips
985 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jan 2015
Lenovo thought it could surf geopolitics, until Trump's sudden tariff changes
LastOS slaps neon paint on Linux Mint and dares you to run Photoshop
Ex-NSA bad-guy hunter listened to Scattered Spider's fake help-desk calls: 'Those guys are good'

Re: Co-op early decisive action, really?
The coop is a bit crap and always has been
There was a time when they were part of my top-up stores list, but they've become much more expensive and these days I only visit them when I have the '£1 off your shopping' offer on the app so I can grab myself a free item.
DoorDash scam used fake drivers, phantom deliveries to bilk $2.59M
Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline
North Korea’s fake tech workers now targeting European employers

Also fake job offers
Lazarus uses LinkedIn to target people working in cryptocurrencies with fake job offers, with the intention to compromise their personal devices and search for crypto-related credentials.
See https://blog.sekoia.io/clickfake-interview-campaign-by-lazarus/.
Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0
Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied
Starliner astronauts' stay drags on as Crew-10 launch scrubs
No peace for Gandi this past weekend, after storage SNAFU breaks email and more

Long gone are the days of Gandi's launch as a registrar, when they sold domain names for $12 while the established players charged you $50. The founder had published an article explaining that, even at this price, he'd be making insane profits selling what was essentally a free resource, for as little work as adding a line record in a database.
Scientists create woolly ma-mouse by looking at mean genes from the Pleistocene
One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee
Untrained techie botched a big hardware sale by breaking client's ERP

Re: Anit-Sales - or not?
A classic demotivator from Despair, Inc.
I'm a security expert, and I almost fell for a North Korea-style deepfake job applicant …Twice
I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: Gotta love those elastic Microsoft minutes
This one never gets old: https://xkcd.com/612/
Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support
Startup plugs AI datacenters into biogas-powered energy
A good kind of disorder: Boffins boost capacitor tech by disturbing dipoles
Google Maps to roll out Trump-approved Denali and Gulf of Mexico rebrands
Google takes action after coder reports 'most sophisticated attack I've ever seen'
China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Re: Wolf goat cabbage - where did that come from?
That was the point. The models have certainly been acquainted with the classical version of the riddle, but in the test case they have added the 3 secure compartments. This makes it trivial to solve for a human who pays attention to the wording, but an AI may be fooled into providing the usual 5-step solution. Other trick questions involve asking to measure a volume of 2 litres with 2-, 3- and 5-litre jugs.
Astronomers red-faced after mistaking Musk's Tesla Roadster for asteroid
How to leave the submarine cable cutters all at sea – go Swedish
Donald Trump proposes US govt acquire half of TikTok, which thanks him and restores service
Boeing going backwards as production’s slowing and woes keep flowing
Pastor's divine 'dream' crypto scheme indicted by Uncle Sam

"In the old days, gold bars would be held in a vault and the notes traded in public would represent the value held in the vault. I could use the Bitcoin as backing, like a financial vault, and create a new currency - let's imagine it's called James Coin - which would replicate one for one the assets in the Bitcoin wallet."
I'm not a finance expert, but isn't the idea of a vault, that someone can actually access and retrieve its contents at any time? And wasn't the gold standard abandoned like 50 years ago?
But nevermind, I'm sure he will find enough suckers (cf first story in the article) to make a nice profit.
Tesla recalls 239,382 vehicles over rearview camera problems
Europe coughs up €400 to punter after breaking its own GDPR data protection rules

Re: Just the ONE German citizen?
Maybe he was the only one bold enough to login with his FB credentials, THEN complain that his data was being leaked to the US? I mean, shame on the European Commission for even allowing this login method, but if the guy was savvy enough to know what would happen to his info, he could have abstained instead pf going ahead then sung for damages (which were rightfully denied by the court).
Mail-out madness as insurer offers refunds to customers in error

Re: Not the first time.
Similar for me with BA, but it was me chasing them to get a refund. They had rebooked us on a next-day flight after a missed connection due to their own delay. A few days later they took some payments on the credit card that had paid for the tickets, but we only noticed 6 months later. The amount corresponded to a booking change fee, so we asked for a refund. For almost a year they simply refused with excuses from "we always charge fees when you amend your booking" to a surreal "we are sorry you had a technical issue with your booking and that prices have gone up by the time you completed your purchase". The 10th customer relation rep finally seemed to understand our problem, and asked to confirm the booking refs and payment dates, then replied that the charges were related to a different booking that we had just forgotten about (we had used airmiles so only paid a small booking fee which turned out to be the same as a change fee...). This could have been sorted after my first email if only they hadn't gone straight to the bullshit-excuse generator.
Scammers exploit UK's digital landline switch to swipe cash
Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook
Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Re: Apple II
I found myself in a similar situation on a New Year's eve some 20 years ago. I was working in a financial institution, in a team supporting an application that consolidated market prices which were then used by a plethora of accounting and risk systems. One end-of-day job was failing after 30 minutes and after several failed relaunches we concluded that we had to look inside the code and fix whatever was taking too long. Of course this being the last day of the financial year, this job was one link in a long chain of critical processes, so there was a certain amount of pressure to solve the issue quickly.
This was a long bash script, so by adding a few traces to stderr we quickly identified the problematic part: it was trying to match and merge 2 very long text files by grepping a keyword in the first line in File1 to the whole of File2, then moving to the 2nd line of File1, etc... Since both files had tens of thousands of lines each, this was obviously most inefficient and it was frankly surprising that this hadn't happened sooner [1]. We wrote a quick-and-dirty Perl script to do all the matching in 1 or 2 passes [2], and the job completed in a few minutes.
[1] of course, Sod's law dictated that it had to happen on a 31st of December of all days
[2] soon after, I learned about the 'join' Unix utility that would have done the job even faster
Arianespace's Vega C delayed after gantry throws a tantrum
Musk, America PAC sued for allegedly rigging $1M election prize
Microsoft 365 Copilot goes monthly for a 5% premium and annual commitment
Apple drops soldered storage for 2024 Mac Mini
Nolanverse Batmobile leaps barrier between film and reality – but it'll cost you
Your air fryer might be snitching on you to China

Re: This will get worse.
Do you need it to start up at a set time?
A simple microwave, probably not, but there are some situations where you might want a delayed start for an appliance:
- you need to leave home in the morning but want your Sunday roast to be cooked when you are back
- you want to do a laundry today but don't want to leave the wet clothes in the machine for hours, so you set a delay to have the cycle end when you're back home
- you want to take advantage of off-peak electricity rates (e.g run the dishwasher between 3am and 7am)
But these features have been available for decades without needing an app or an internet connnection.