Posts by FrogsAndChips

Lenovo thought it could surf geopolitics, until Trump's sudden tariff changes

Didn't Amazon consider that, until Bezos received a nice phone call from the Orange In Chief?

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

Re: Bloatware Linux

Windows serves you ads and bundles spyware so you need to spend another half an hour finding how to turn that off.

Only half an hour? What's your secret?

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

Re: A Matter of Scale

Agree, that's weird. I would expect the driver's fee to be taken from the client's payment for the order. No client payment, no fee. Here it seems the third-party was happy to pay out the fee even without an order being actually paid.

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

"Go too far with the solar/wind component of your grid and their are engineering consequences to be dealt with."

Icarus: "Shut up, Dad!"

I'm not a huge fan

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

Oh FFS, just remove the shortcut from your desktop and close the tool before sharing your screen with your clients!

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

Re: I for one...

MS Powertoys has a 'Text Extractor' utlity that lets you select areas of documents (pictures, copy-protected pdf...), performs OCR and copies the result in the clipboard. Pretty useful when someone sent you a screenshot of 100 30-digit long IDs and you need the actual values.

Starliner astronauts' stay drags on as Crew-10 launch scrubs

Sunita: Open the pod bay doors, Donald!

Trump: I'm afraid I can't do that, Suni.

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

I, for one,

welcome our new tiny, cutesy, furry overlords.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

He shouldn't have been peeping through these files, though.

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

Re: Interesting

But, how come I'd be there?

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

Re: Not just IT

Have an upvote for the Pink Floyd reference!

Startup plugs AI datacenters into biogas-powered energy

Re: Biogas from Biomass is NOT Sustainable

The article you're linking refers to burning wood pellets to generate electricity, not biogas. The facility here uses food and agricultural waste to produce biogas (methane), no deforestation involved.

A good kind of disorder: Boffins boost capacitor tech by disturbing dipoles

Applications?

As far as I understand, these improved capacitors will not replace Li-Ion batteries, so what kind of improvements can we expect in our phones from this capacity (no pun intended) to discharge more 'quick' energy?

Google Maps to roll out Trump-approved Denali and Gulf of Mexico rebrands

Re: What's in a name...

That's why Musk wants to rename it to the 'George Washington Channel'.

Google takes action after coder reports 'most sophisticated attack I've ever seen'

Can someone explain

How the scammers had access to the reset code that appeared on the victim's screen? Either it was coming from Google and they shouldn't see it, or it was a bogus notification sent by the scammers but then how would it enable them to take control of the account?

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

Re: a problem that is set to worsen as more nations and companies venture to the Moon and beyond

ObTomLehrer: ""Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department', says Wernher Von Braun"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

How to leave the submarine cable cutters all at sea – go Swedish

Re: which way is NATO moving?

A singularity?

Donald Trump proposes US govt acquire half of TikTok, which thanks him and restores service

Re: This isn't about today's propaganda.

Huh? I... I don't know that.

Boeing going backwards as production’s slowing and woes keep flowing

"landing with everyone safely aboard"

Apart from the poor blokes on the path of the shrapnel that made the swiss cheese holes...

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

Isn't that a Cybertruck you're describing?

I stand corrected but I would never drive one, fuel savings or not.

I doubt you can sell a car without rear-view mirrors at all. Rearview cameras are a driving aid that more and more people rely on, but you can't depend on it.

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.

Re: I used to have

2 solutions for your problem:

- install the Don't Fuck With Paste browser extension

- use KeePass with AutoType which inputs your password character by character instead of pasting it

Scammers exploit UK's digital landline switch to swipe cash

Re: 'Safely Switched'

"I also have a backup solar system"

That will be handy next time the Vogons come around to build that hyperspace bypass.

Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook

Re: treat each citation it finds as a single unique token

But to do that, it would have to be able to recognize a citation, and determine that it's an actual one instead of a fictional one. That to me is already beyond the capacities of all existing LLMs.

Re: The answer is No

Based on my statistical analysis of crossword puzzles, I can state with confidence that the capital of Japan is Edo.

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

Because it gives the opportunity to write 2 articles, saying how ESA is crap compared to SpaceX, for the price of 1 laucnh.

Musk, America PAC sued for allegedly rigging $1M election prize

Obligatory xkcd (not the one you're thinkimg of).

Microsoft 365 Copilot goes monthly for a 5% premium and annual commitment

Re: Copilot annual commitment

Or "Hey Copilot, fetch me the salaries and bonuses of my entire department from the poorly secured HR Sharepoint".

Re: 'cash flow flexibility'

Wonder why I read this as 'cash cow' in a Microsoft article.

Apple drops soldered storage for 2024 Mac Mini

Re: "The SSD card is currently a proprietary Apple format"

It probably has rounded corners.

Nolanverse Batmobile leaps barrier between film and reality – but it'll cost you

Re: unspecified "advanced software upgrades"

or Jarvis, if we're ready to cross the multiverses.

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.

HAL : Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.."

Amazon's nuclear datacenter dreams stall as watchdog rejects power deal

Re: This bowl is advertised as lettuce

Please leave Liz Truss out of this discussion.

41-million-digit prime crunched by datacenter GPUs

a special class of prime numbers that are especially large

Mersenne primes are not especially large. M₂ is 3.

Millions of Android and iOS users at risk from hardcoded creds in popular apps

It's not just the data leaks that the company should be worried about. Depending on the privileges associated with the credentials, this could lead to a complete takeover of the AWS/Azure account (think data deletion, ransomware, cryptomining, spam sending...).

The billionaire behind Trump's 'unhackable' phone is on a mission to fight Tesla's FSD

Re: What's the point of a secure phone for Trump?

'maga2020!' was the reportedly real one.

WhatsApp may expose the OS you use to run it – which could expose you to crooks

Re: "...which could expose you to crooks..."

Eternal September gets longer and longer each year...