Posts by Phil Koenig

Microsoft signed a dodgy driver and now ransomware scum are exploiting it

Re: Revole the certificate!

Are they trying to blackmail us into upgradjng or something?

How dare you suggest such a thing.

We now return you to your regular revoling tasks.

Ex-NSA grandee says Trump's staff cuts will 'devastate' America's national security

Re: Best Interests of the US

So you're saying if I cut your staff by 50%, remove the best and most skilled workers, eviscerate the budget, install an ignoramus political lackey as director who now prioritizes going after the Orange Troll's domestic political enemies rather than actually fighting and defending against the country's geopolitical adversaries and destroy the agency's overall morale in the process, such crippled organizations can magically rise above all that just by "working quietly"?

Please expand on this magical technique of yours.

Amazon, Meta, Google sign pledge to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050

Small modular reactors (SMRs)

What a dangerous joke of an idea that is.

Sounds like it was concocted by random TechBro's... oh wait: that's exactly who concocted it.

We cannot even consistently keep the current reactors safe with vast armies of engineers, technicians, analysts, safety regulators and administrators.

And these brainiacs want to put one on every streetcorner, presumably to be monitored by the guy whose main job is checking ID badges and cleaning the toilet???

CISA pen-tester says 100-strong red team binned after DOGE canceled contract

Re: What would Trump/Musk actually do differently if they were working for a foreign power?

Trump did actually say "I'm on the side of the world" recently. Maybe he meant it.

And we already know Musk is on Mars' side..

Billionaires have zero "national allegiance".

Their only true "allegiance" is to their money.

The world has no need for billionaires.

Re: Stolen Elections

Realistically, it's going to take weeks - if not months - before Trump's economic policies really start to take effect...

The impacts are already here. All those people who were shock-fired with zero notice will be chopping their expenditures, defaulting on monthly payments and loans, and the various businesses that did substantial business with the eviscerated agencies and their workers will have to either radically downsize themselves or just close down entirely. I've already seen reports of these things.

Re: New Orleans

New Orleans is darn near AT sea level...

Actually New Orleans is anywhere between 2 to 6 metres BELOW sea level. As the locals say: "It's like a big bowl".

They have pumps that have to constantly pump the water out of the city when it gets rainy there.

Of course, the pumps also have a habit of failing...

Sweden seizes cargo ship after another undersea cable hit in suspected sabotage

Make flags of convenience, inconvenient.

I'd suggest making the "Flag of Convenience" countries into Insurer of Last Resort for the ships they permit to sail under their flags. A hefty bill presented to the Central Bank of wherever might encourage more due diligence.

I like this idea a lot.

The shipping industry's corruption in this regard is getting very tiresome, especially in the current geopolitical climate.

That Magical Military Ship

a single military ship could just do that and nothing else

Please show me the magical ship that can continuously monitor every minute, 24 hours a day, every inch of a million miles of critical western undersea cables.

That would be one heck of a technical marvel.

Furthermore, if it really were the case that all these "incompetent ships" were constantly tearing up deep sea data cables, it would have been happening on a frequent basis for decades.

But it hasn't. And certainly not all mysteriously concentrated in maritime areas surrounding Russia.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck...

Citrix slated to axe its Technology Professional program

It's particularly obnoxious when companies have the audacity to claim that they are improving support when all they are doing is cutting costs.

It's disturbingly common these days. I propose a new descriptive shortcut: CUTSPEAK.

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

Re: Don't believe it if you are called

Why would he believe Google is calling him WITH A LIVE CALLER about a possible account compromise? Do they do that in real life?

Excellent point.

Google in particular is so completely averse to using human representatives for ANYTHING that you are forced to deal with endless web forms, chatbots, email robots and so on to get a resolution on almost ANY service they provide!

Google hiring actual humans to make outgoing VOICE calls to people?? That's hilarious!

US freezes foreign aid, halting cybersecurity defense and policy funds for allies

A child's understanding of the world

It's like the entire executive is now run by people with little more than a child's understanding of the world

Indeed, this mentality is rampant amongst the MAGA base and rhetoric from the people and organizations who cater to them.

Every once in a blue moon I am forced to expose myself to the discourse on Murdoch's Fox News right-wing US media juggernaut and it's like going back to high-school or even middle school in terms of the level of emotional maturity. Very hard to watch. ("NYAH NYAH UR STUPID!!" "AND DEMOCRATS ARE UGLY!!" Etc etc etc.)

Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks

Re: When the industry only has 2 players...

google and apple are just as bad when it comes to user privacy, considering that both were part of PRISM

Pretty much all the large US IT players were part of PRISM so that's not saying much.

Google simply tells the truth as to most of the spying they do

Not at all.

If you dig very deeply you might be able to find a lot of the details but the majority of their public statements are extremely deceptive on such matters.

My axiom at this point is that whenever Google makes a public announcement that they are doing something to "improve user privacy", this change is inevitably accompanied by 3 OTHER things that actually DEGRADE your privacy which they DO NOT publicly mention. (And by "publicly mention" I mean announcements made to the general public, not arcane technical documents only ever read by coders and such who are already likely to be Google acolytes.)

As far as Apple "lying" - I would say that in that company's case it's more a matter of creative omission and simultaneously crowing about how much they supposedly care about your privacy. Their users tend to be much more credulous about such things so it's not a difficult game for them to play.

As for the homomorphic encryption and such - that stuff is not just not enabled by default, it also only applies if you keep all your Apple Things at the latest hardware and software versions. For example, it does not apply in my case due to the older Mac I am currently typing this on, which is prevented from enabling the "advanced iCloud encryption" stuff.

Explain to me again why Apple went from selling computers and stuff to mainly phones?

Probably because there is more money to be made in the smartphone market than there is in the PC market.

Pretty simple.

The hardware sales revenue globally is over double the sales revenue for PC hardware.

Furthermore, the software market for smartphones is almost completely funnelled through the two smartphone platform vendors, Google and Apple. Many more software purchases are done directly with the software/games houses for personal computers than is the case with smartphones, the latter of which both Google and Apple get a handsome cut of.

Lastly, smartphones are a "lifestyle" product that the vast majority of people these days around the world are carrying at least one of. Whereas in many countries in the world, very few people own a personal computer.

The End.

https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/devices/pcs/worldwide

https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/consumer-electronics/telephony/smartphones/worldwide

Re: The same argument about scanning for CSAM appiles

This technology is purposely designed to NOT be usable for detecting CSAM, because it does everything it can to eliminate...

Well, you really drank the KoolAid, hmm?

Given Apple's attempt to DO JUST THAT just a few years ago which created a global scandal (LINK), I wouldn't be so sanguine about their intentions or lack of thinking such things through, at this point.

Fool me once...

...it is possible to disable Google backing everything up to "the cloud" and keep my photos on my device and nowhere else.

Not to worry, every single Google app and online service tracks and collects your personal data like a bloodhound powered by the Sun of 10,000 datacenters, because that's how Google makes 80% of their annual corporate revenue.

The main difference between Apple and Google in that regard is that Apple's business-model is not so completely reliant on making money by selling products to 3rd parties based on that personal data of yours.

They collect it mostly for "user convenience" and making it semantically harder to switch platforms due to all that stuff that they "conveniently" keep of yours. Because Apple has successfully managed to transition their platform to a "lifestyle" rather than just a product or technology.

Data Abuse Duopoly

We have basically a mobile platform duopoly and both of them abuse user privacy.

But Google is well known to be basically the worst personal data abuser in history, at least for a commercial company rather than a nation-state.

So the choices are abuse, or absolutely egregious abuse.

Lovely state of affairs.

Everyone should remember the cyberpunk axiom: Data Wants to be Free.

Every bit of unnecessarily copied personal data is just another thing that can now eventually fall into the hands of malicious actors.

Whether that's intentional on the part of the party that surreptitiously absconded with it in the first place (eg adtech companies and malware) or unintentional due to corporate incompetence, excessive profiteering, laziness, nonchalance or corporate miserliness, the end result is the same.

When the industry only has 2 players...

People have been sold on how convenient it is for their devices to upload media to the cloud and how easy they've made it to "share" that content.

When the entire handheld platform industry is completely controlled by just 2 companies, no one needs to get "sold" on any particular feature before choosing to buy into that platform because there are virtually no other alternatives. Google is even worse when it comes to user privacy than Apple is. FAR worse.

In this case I agree with the OP: most people did NOT ask for Apple to be snooping around on their devices for data to upload to the Apple server farm without their permission. At the very least they should be PROMPTED for this action before proceeding.

Especially since Apple loves to crow about how they supposedly respect their user's privacy and their right to control their own data.

I have used handheld devices from a large variety of platforms over the years, and use and support both android and apple devices today.

Previously, I had all the iCloud functions disabled on my iPhone. But when I recently upgraded that device, Apple basically tricked me into enabling those functions during the device migration by presenting a dialog that implied that without accepting that login prompt, the App Store would not work. (Historically you could login to the App Store separately from a general iPhone/iCloud login, and this is still true, so that dialog presented was intentionally misleading in that regard)

So they started sucking all the data off that phone WITHOUT MY PERMISSION while I was doing that migration, and after frantically disabling all the cloud functions and selecting the option to delete whatever was "synced" I was still unable to disable iCloud entirely.

Then when I researched how to delete all the iCloud data Apple started failing to authenticate me to my account (a longstanding problem with them) and blocked me from doing so.

This stuff is absolutely "Big Brother-like" and there's no reason they don't give users more obvious choices to disable these functions if they wish to do so, other than Apple's commercial objectives of "capturing" your data and making it semantically more likely you'll feel "locked" to the platform as a result.

Tesla Cybertruck, a paragon of reliability, recalled again

Tesla and AC technology

Turns out the Tesla motors are three phase (AC) induction motors hence the inverter.

Good old AC machine engineering

Imagine naming an electric car company "Tesla", whose hallmark feature are its AC motors - after an inventor famous for advancing the art of alternating current production, distribution and usage...

Australia tells tots: No TikTok till you're 16... or X, Instagram and Facebook

Instagram IS Facebook/Meta

I suspect that if Facebook has fewer underage people than it did, it's because it's not the thing to do anymore. They're all on Instagram or Tiktok instead.

Facebook took over Instagram in 2012.

Zuckerberg & Co. runs both of them these days.

Re: who's responsibility?

However, I'm not sure you would care about those different subsets as you've already decided what the explanation for all these things must be.

Have you ever noticed how many people often accuse others of personal foibles that are not particularly evident with the recipient of such critiques, but the critic themselves happens to display it in spades themselves?

Given how long I've been doing the "visiting various businesses" thing, I can see the changes over time.

Now I could have given 100 other examples from various other realms of life as well, but when people's minds are made up, they're made up, hm?

Suffice to say, the impacts are everywhere and easily visible to those who pay attention and have been around since before the FB/YT/TikTok/etc era.

"Changes in etiquette" do not get hatched in someone's evil laboratory and imposed on us by Big Brother without our consent, they are a reaction to a change in public attitudes.

And those "changes in attitude" are precisely the things In talking about here.

Re: who's responsibility?

Tiktok, Facebook and Instagram etc. are how young people (kids) stay in touch with each other these days.

That's actually a big part of the problem.

In case you haven't noticed (and perhaps things in the UK are slightly different than here in the states), people under the age of about 30 these days (otherwise known as people who grew up with the WWW and algorithm-driving social networking), have all sorts of social problems from general social anxiety, fear of romantic relationships, fear of talking on the phone rather than some form of texting (thus taking away their "shield from emotional vulnerability"), etc etc.

All of these things are ultimately going to cause (and have already caused) a variety of avoidable social engagement issues. A veteran teacher I know in central Europe for example complains of the same things that teachers here complain about these days with with regard to high-school age students: lack of focus (eg continuously distracted by the phones and other online things), lack of sleep, lack of the fortitude to stick with projects, etc etc.

As an IT consultant I go to various company environments and in recent years here it's gotten to the point where half the staff has got headphones on at work most of the day and if you have the audacity to walk up to one of them to ask a question they often glare at you like you are illegally trying to pierce their hermetic personal bubble.

It's time that young people learn how to actually interact constructively with other humans in the flesh again, before the entire world ends up socially crippled.

Combustion engines grind Linus Torvalds' gears

EV Repairs

Wait until Linus finds out how expensive it is to repair that EV of his when he gets into a minor fender-bender.

That could turn the car repair industry into something far bigger than the car industry itself.

If Trump gets elected, get your tech buying done asap

Fully sold

Nevertheless, Trump's supporters seem fully sold on the tariffs ideal.

Trump's supporters would be fully sold on the idea of closing all the hospitals and switching to bleeding people with leeches when they become ill.

WinAmp's woes will pass, but its wonders will be here forever

Re: The good ol' days

I remember that version. Nice to see it's still working on Win11. (Which I have managed to mostly avoid so far but it will be inevitable before too long)

All I ever used Winamp for was for Shoutcast streaming. Is it still good at that? Should I completely avoid the 5.x versions?

Thanks

AWS boss: Don't want to come back to the office? Go work somewhere else

Re: Choices

Bebu:

...quietly moving to greener, better tended pastures...

Sure, but those pastures have to actually exist.

I've been saying for years now that companies would eventually get tired of everyone expecting to work remotely.

That time is now upon us.

From the employer's PoV, WFH works for some roles and people, not for others. This is not a big surprise. Companies will vary in how much flexibility they are open to on that.

But in the mid-term, I suspect those pastures will be shrinking in comparison to the pandemic emergency era. We shall see.

Re: It may be a security issue.

FIA:

Dell were touting their WFH policy until fairly recently.

I said at the beginning of the pandemic that a lot of companies would eventually figure out why WFH is not optimal for many roles and workers.

We all know why the workers like it. That does not automatically make it best for all companies and roles.

Over time, I think we will see fewer and fewer companies allowing it on a blanket basis.

But for people like the gentleman here who mentioned he was coding for 48 years - I think it's safe to say that they know how to pace their work and workload and if their role doesn't entail a lot of in-person brainstorming without having to stare at a silly screen to see who you are interacting with and what their expressions are and so on, then I think that's a good example of a role/employee which would be well-suited for it.

Not surprising, really

I've been saying since the beginning of the pandemic that business owners would soon get tired of all the issues with remote workers.

Remote working sounds like a nice idea for workers but there are a lot of downsides to it as well, many of which have nothing to do with workers being lazy etc.

Obviously business-owners are now figuring this out, even if they supported it previously.

California cops cuff suspect in deadly drone-assisted drug deal

Dinanziame:

knowingly and willfully operating an unregistered aircraft in furtherance of a felony narcotics crime

Weird combination.

Not really.

The implication is that if the aircraft were registered, it would be easier to track the owner's criminal activities.

The reason criminals typically do not obey such laws - including gun registration laws - is because it makes them hard to catch and prosecute them for their crimes. It is literally the primary reason why such items must be registered to begin with.

Both guns and aircraft can come in very handy if your intention is to commit crimes.

FTC drops hammer on unwanted subscriptions with 'click to cancel' rule

FINALLY!!

Smart homes may be a bright idea, just not for the dim bulbs who live in 'em

Doctor Syntax:

The word "Smart" applied to any object is a warning. Take heed of it.

Heh.

My version is: "Smart is not smart".

Among other things, it usually refers to something that spies on you and/or your surroundings. And oftentimes insecure as well.

We have too much of that already.

Cops love facial recognition, and withholding info on its use from the courts

Re: Multiple Dangers

AC:

It makes privacy laws a stupid joke...

That would definitely be one of the potential problems - but first you would need some privacy laws to make a joke of.

We are talking about America here, where privacy laws are so 1990's. Today we worship the Gods of Surveillance Capitalism, and they pay the politicians very well...

Pentagon stumped by mystery drone swarm flying over Langley Air Force Base

Re: 20 ft long and invulnerable

Just as good as that neat idea to arm airline pilots and other staff with firearms:

In the event of a terrorist attack, make sure to blow a bunch of holes in the airframe so when it goes down you can say it wasn't due to the terrorists...

Internet Archive wobbles back online, with limited functionality

Re: My question is... Why?

I seem to recall some sort of pitched controversy recently over their practice of keeping copies of music, videos and books.

The publishers of those things appear to be quite unhappy about it these days.

Other than that, the USA is about to vote for president in a few weeks (along with various other posts around the country), and I can think of some dirty laundry that certain candidates would probably wish was not easily viewable...

What I'd like to know is what kind of user details do they actually keep?

Discussion forum users?

FCC fines be damned, ESPN misuses emergency alert tones yet again

Re: Broadcast licence?

Everyone deserves due process...

These days in the USA, "due process" means that wealthy people and corporations almost never pay for their bad behaviour.

Trump is a perfect example. He managed to stall and stonewall the IRS for so many years over his corrupt tax returns that they finally gave up, it was too costly and too time-consuming to continue. Precisely the outcome Trump wanted. He does this with any entity he has a disagreement with of any kind.

(Doesn't help that the Republican party regularly eviscerates the IRS's budget whenever they are in power, precisely so that they cannot afford to pursue such enforcement cases.)

Biz hired, and fired, a fake North Korean IT worker – then the ransom demands began

Re: Identity

...you could just transfer those GB of data straight off a corporate network onto a pen drive...

On the networks I have managed, I tend to disable or restrict all the desktop USB ports for that reason. It doesn't take a wily attacker from North Korea to do something stupid with a USB port, regular employees do it all the time. Not necessarily because they are trying to overtly attack the company, but just because they are ignorant, self-centered, etc.

Same goes for staff trying to plug random things into the ethernet jacks.

Re: Hiring a North Korean fake IT worker

Decent corporate security tools can lock down all sorts of things on workstations including app installation no matter where the destination folder is.

Google started the "install into appdata" garbage when they were trying to evade corporate policies on user-installed S/W to get Chrome into the door of all those companies.

It started going downhill from there.

Which is why clueful IT departments know how to block those installs too.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund throws cash at FreeBSD and Samba

Re: The Click Chain

When I am reading a textbook, I like to be able to leave it open flat to follow instructions on two pages, compare things on 2 pages, and flip back/forth a lot, sometimes somewhat randomly. Etc.

Those things are hard to do with e-books, e-book displays tend to be smallish, and if you don't have your e-ink device with you all the time, hard on your eyes as well.

But to reiterate my earlier point - if these overpriced, quickly-obsoleted books were not so bloated by useless junk, their tree usage would be much less already.

The Click Chain

...talking a user through the entire click chain exhaustively...

I've often felt that the majority of the ridiculously overpriced mainstream comptech books for particular versions of things like Windows or major productivity apps (which have to be replaced every 2-3 years every time the menu structures change slightly) ballooned the number of pages (and price) of those books 80% by tediously going step-by-step-by-step, click-by-click-by-click, dropdown here, long press there, bla bla bla" when all I wanted to see was:

"Go to the X page/menu and select the desired option"

..and let the presumably somewhat intelligent and observant reader figure the rest out.

And save at least 9,999,999,999,999 trees from unnecessary destruction. Not to mention all the money you spent on uselessly fat books that you could have used for something more useful, like food to sustain your bodily functions.

Firefox's Mozilla follows Google in losing trust in Entrust's TLS certificates

If Google and Mozilla wanted to be in the CA business, they would be.

AFAIK Google IS in the CA business.

I've certainly seen certificates from them that look that way.

They may not be selling end-user certs branching off those CAs (I think they're mostly for internal use) but they do run their own CAs.

Top-secret X-37B space plane ready for daring new orbital maneuver

Re: Hmm...

Seems to me more likely it's a maneuver to cloak what it is actually doing for a short time until the trackers figure out what it just did with that orbit change.

Because it's traveling lower than most orbiting objects and thus subject to atmospheric drag, this particular maneuver is something that probably could not be accomplished at higher altitudes without that atmosphere to generate drag:

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/07/23/former-secaf-explains-how-secret-x-37-space-plane-throws-enemies.html

Secret orbit changes

This must be one of the maneuvers that they are hoping allows the X-37B to change its orbit mid-flight, allowing it to evade foreign tracking for a while so it can go somewhere unanticipated to snoop.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2019/07/23/former-secaf-explains-how-secret-x-37-space-plane-throws-enemies.html

FBI created a cryptocurrency so it could watch it being abused

"A single informed person"

Yes, dictators generally think that they are geniuses.

It's true, social media moderators do go after conservatives

Correlation is not Causation

At least here in the USA these days there is a growing mental laziness amongst the press and some sectors of the "science" community, along with a degree of credulousness amongst the public, that exploits the modern ease of crunching numbers digitally and falls victim to the temptation of using this to create sensational clickbait based upon junk science.

These so-called "researchers" often jump to all sorts of unwarranted conclusions simply because of some fuzzy correlations which they do not actually understand, nor have they actually discovered much less proven any sort of actual, demonstrable cause/effect relationship, other than being vaguely "correlated" amongsts the factors they cherry-picked to publish such "studies".

This sort of junk-science will tell you nonsense like "[ethnicity X] children are academic underachievers" instead of what they are typically really measuring, like "Certain factors in poor neighborhoods (with a disproportionate number of "ethnicity X" families, poorly funded schools due to lack of a robust tax base in the region and a high overall level of crime and violence in the area) tend to undermine academic achievement".

This is the same sort of populist agitprop we see when so-called journalists or scientists jump to unsupported clickbait such as "Fact-checkers target right-wing people just because of their politics" when in fact such individuals are generally just being singled-out for their tendency to spread nonsense.

Stephen Colbert's famous line that "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" may have been tongue-in-cheek but there is actually something to this.

As one Redditor sums it up nicely:

That's the point of liberalism. It emerged from the Enlightenment as an ideology that threw off the shackles of religion, the belief in noble bloodlines, and was based on the ideas of empirical knowledge and scientific study.

Reality has a liberal bias because liberalism is based on what can be proven.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/oekupc/comment/h46vydx/

Cloudflare beats patent troll so badly it basically gives up

One Down, 3,424,719 to Go..

If the USA does not address its penchant for granting patents on things like air and water this nonsense will never abate.

Though I rather doubt the USA at this point is the only offender in the world on such things.

T-Mobile US to cough up $31.5M after that long string of security SNAFUs

Corporate Capture of Government

T-Mobile's US division is just one of a vast number of US corporations that have skated along with piss-poor data security practices for years to pad their profits because the consequences of such public-hostile practices have almost always been minimal.

FINALLY we have leadership personnel at regulatory agencies like the FCC that are actually making an effort to do something about this, but in turn these agencies like the FCC and FTC are also hamstrung by the US courts, which often rule in favor of the corporate interests if they run to court over it. As a result, their "enforcement actions" are often weaksauce, because that is all they can reasonably expect to get past the civil court system.

The Biden administration was able to address much of the corporate regulatory capture of federal regulatory agencies in a matter of a few years, an impressive achievement. (And a stark contrast to the norms of the last ~40 years) Fixing the heavily pro-corporate weighted federal judiciary after years of pollution by the likes of entities like the Federalist Society will take a lot longer, if ever, to fix.

Most Americans are still in thrall to the widespread cultural mythology here that large corporations where CEOs today are typically being paid 300-600 times what their average worker are being paid* are just benevolent dispensers of lovely jobs and cool stuff to you, the ever-grateful little people.

Until that changes, expect more of the same when it comes to corporate regulation.

*(Whereas the average CEO-to-worker pay disparity in 1965 was just 21 to 1.)

https://www.progressivecaucuscenter.org/the-ceo-pay-problem-and-what-we-can-do-about-it

.

US govt hiding top hurricane forecast model sparks outrage after deadly Helene

The Fix is In

There are so many things happening these days within the US government agencies that would have been unheard-of just 25 years ago.

From finding ways to allow the federal government to fund purely religious organizations (started during George II's reign and blatantly unconstitutional) to the Conman-in-Chief's administration (with the help of cynical henchmen like Mitch OConnell and others) where he not only installed boatloads of political hacks into agencies that then set about systematically disassembling their regulatory mission, but then topped it all off by writing executive orders that made it trivial for the executive branch to fire federal workers for any (but obviously purely political in this case) reason.

Luckily the latter were mostly rescinded by Biden on day 1, but many of the "trojan horses" remain, including the head of the US Postal Service, which just happens to be responsible for delivering mailed-in federal election ballots on time, rather than "mysteriously disappearing them in opposition-dominated districts".

Tesla trounces shareholders who alleged Autopilot was all share-pumping lies

Fresh and new judge

I see she only took her position in February 2023, without a single Republican Senator voting to confirm. Kamala Harris had to cast the tie-breaking vote.

Which suggests she's not considered a shoe-in for the Musk team. But perhaps her lack of judicial experience makes her a soft target for Musk-style 'convincing' anyway.

It's a curious ruling, especially in light of the State of California's current lawsuit against the company for misrepresenting the efficacy of its romantically-named "full self-driving", which in the fine print (probably in 2-point type) advises drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel at all times regardless.

After 3 years, Windows 11 has more than half Windows 10's market share

Deck Chairs

Besides the Microsoft-specific complaints, it needs to be said that basically ALL the major commercial OS platforms, whether on desktop or handheld, have gotten to the point that every "upgrade" these days is basically just re-arranging the deck chairs.

Until that changes, especially on desktop, expect users to give a big yawn to the latest iteration of their respective software dinosaurs.

Whereas when it comes to the current handheld OS duopoly (which also suffers from "deck chair syndrome"), users are already locked into a rapid hardware obsolescence cycle and devices are regularly dropped in the ocean or run over by buses so everyone has resigned themselves to the continuous upgrade cycle there.

AT&T claims VMware by Broadcom offered it a 1,050 percent price rise

Re: Sweet Irony

It's true that ATT is one of the worst corporate abominations itself.

But in this case it's not like the entire industry hasn't had basically the same reaction to Broadcom's shameless attempt to extort money from the customers of a new acquisition that spent decades building that business only for Broadcom to drive them away en-masse.