Posts by FrogsAndChips

Raspberry Pi flashes new branded USB drives that promise speedy performance

Re: Here are some numbers for the Pi

Here are some more: 3 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5 3 5 8 9 7 9 3 2 3 8 4 6 2 6...

Tech support detective solved PC crime by looking in the carpark

Today certainly, in the era of Windows XP, not so much.

25 years ago, there was very little in terms of web filtering, USB ports blocking, locking down of Windows accounts, even at the large institutions (think FTSE100) I've worked with...

Firefox 147 brings GPU boost, tidier tabs, and video that follows you around

I have autoplay disabled and still some videos autoplay on the Grauniad's homepage.

France fines telcos €42M for sub-par security prior to 24M customer breach

Yeah, I got my initial math wrong and thought they had indeed been hit with a 4% fine, which I believe would have been a first for GDPR fines.

That said, the leaked data was not considered sensitive as per GDPR criteria (even bank details are not), so it was probably a mitigating factor, because they have no excuses for poor security measures and late notification.

This one was reported more than 1 year ago, it's only the fine that was issued today.

Electric cars no more likely to flatten you than the noisy ones, study finds

Re: I'd have thought this would be obvious

The Lime bikes only click when 'hijacked' to ride without paying.

Couriers don't ride Lime, they have fat bikes with oversized batteries and speed-limitation system disabled, which makes them illegal on UK puvlic roads but nothing is done about it.

Lawyer's 6-year-old son uses AI to build copyright infringement generator

Re: Meanwhile, ChatGPT

For borders you don't want plants. You want a wall. A Big, Beautiful wall.

If it's never distributed, by which I mean it stays on your hard drive or a notebook, how can the copyright holder find out about it?

X's location tags remind users of the internet's oldest rule: Trust nothing

Re: The internet

I don't know where you live, but there are plenty of hot girls in my local area.

Linus Torvalds is OK with vibe coding as long as it's not used for anything that matters

Re: Still a programmer

To be honest, underwater photography is hard. If you don't have top hardware and the luxury to lie for hours on the sea floor waiting for the perfect timing, what will happen most of the time is that the fish will show you its tail-end at the exact moment you press the trigger, or make a sudden move giving you a blurry picture, the nudibranch will be completely out of focus because the macro setting isn't working, etc..

In the end it's easier to film everything on a GoPro and select some frames if you absolutely want a picture to put on your desk.

London left buffering as Hyperoptic backup link refuses to boot

Re: Ofcom's voluntary scheme

Sorry abou that. I've been with them for years and never had to complain about the service, but this attitude is inexcusable.

Bitcoin bandit's £5B bubble bursts as cops wrap seven-year chase

Re: Criminal Assets?

If they refund victims to the initial value of their "investments", even inflation adjusted, that would still leave a nice amount for the Treasury (BTC was about USD 10k when the scam ran between 2014 and 2017, it's USD 100k now).

Re: When will Trump be indicted?

Even if the Dems win both Houses, they will still need a 2/3 majority in the Senate to convict Trump and have him removed from office. Never going to happen.

Altman sticks a different hand out, wants tax credits instead of gov loans

Re: Dotcom 2.0

These jokes will never fall flat.

Re: US had previously played a role in critical infrastructure build-outs

"all that AI is claiming to offer at present is essentially more unemployment and higher corporate profit margins"

Isn't that the wet dream of all our governments?

Bank of England says JLR's cyberattack contributed to UK's unexpectedly slower GDP growth

Re: So now we know that cyberattacks cost ...

They should be asking their IT depts what they're going to do funding their IT depts so that they can finally do something about hardening systems, building in resilience etc.

FTFY

Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not

Re: Same old story

Ahem: "It's not much more assuring that DHS also wants to collect new forms of biometric data like voice records, which are increasingly easy to spoof with AI".

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

It's just physics

Elevation in Chantilly, VA, where Discovery is stored: 98 m

Elevation in Houston, TX: 32 m

Just remove the brakes and let gravity do its job.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: HMRC taken down

us-east-1 is where the control plane for IAM is located. If it falls downs, your applications in other regions will still work, users will still be able to login, but you won't be able to make changes like creating new users, editing access policies...

Re: HMRC taken down

It just means you don't have to provision/configure/maintain the servers on which your services/functions/apps will run. You can still choose the region where the servers will be hosted.

Firefox 144 brings fixes, features, and farewells for 32-bit Linux die-hards

Re: Password manager

KeePass has an auto-type feature (not auto-fill, you still need to ask KP to fill in the password), chars are input one at a time and this defeats anti-paste measures.

Re: Password manager

If the passwords you generate are memorable to you, what do you need a password manager for?

Literal crossed wires sent cops after innocent neighbors in child abuse case

Re: Loophole for criminals

Identifying is easy. Just disconnect the wires one by one, 1 second interval, until your kids start yelling.

One of TikTok’s network boffins says it causes ‘massive data wastage’

100% network optimisation

cat /etc/hosts

0.0.0.0 tiktok.com

Make Redmond angry by setting up Windows 11 with a local account

Re: Depressing that this is even necessary.

Don't know why you were downvoted, I also use Keepass to generate random answers to these questions. The one time I was asked one of those answers on the phone, I had much fun dictating a 20-char string of gibberish as my mother's maiden name and having it confirmed as correct.

Print Screen is for noobs: Capture images in Windows like a pro

Re: Capture Text

Don't you need to have PowerToys installed for this to work?

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

Re: Naming convention

There are still plenty of names he could usesteal:

Bad For Business

Dramatic Exit

Funny, It Worked Last Time

Just Testing

Zero Credibility

Teething Problems

X's new 'encrypted' XChat feature seems no more secure than the failure that came before it

Re: WhatsApp

I never said otherwise. See also doublelayer's post below.

Re: WhatsApp

As far as I remember, you need to connect the old and new devices in order to retrieve message history on the new device. No need for Whatsapp to keep a copy of your keys.

KDE targets Windows 10 'exiles' claiming 'your computer is toast'

Re: If you're embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem...

I have a 10+ year-old laptop with a Mint/W7 dual boot. The W7 boot was botched during a Mint update many moons ago and I never invested enough time in managing to repair it, so it's been sitting unused since. I rarely use it now anyway but keep it as it's the only device left capable of reading DVDs. Like you, I haven't reclaimed the space yet but keep promising myself one day I will!

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'.