Posts by aks

Amazon rewards loyal Kindle devotees by closing the book on old e-readers

Re: Not a problem with my paper books

Criminal behaviour! Alongside people who write in books (not authors, obviosly) and people who turn down corners. Grrr

Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign

Re: Teenage boys will be salivating...

The deliberate crippling of traffic will happen and become a major issue.

UK digital ID goes in-house, government swears it isn't an ID card

Re: It's not an ID card

Why should where you're born relate to your nationality? Your birth cert doesn't show the hospital where you've been born but the registered address of your parent(s).

Birth tourism has been highlighted recently in the USA and is important where I live.

Re: It's not an ID card

Are you suggesting that the government *won't* supply you with the device containing the digital id?

Surrender as a service: Microsoft unlocks BitLocker for feds

Re: An extension of the state

Why would governments give money to such companies. That's the price of doing business there.

UK trade department put civil servants' feelings first during Windows 11 migration

Re: Curious? Don't be so silly!

Or quill and vellum

Re: When going through change, …

Clearly, by then, AI will have replaced these jobs. :p

Child safety or age-gating for all? UK social media ban plan draws fire

Call me an old cynic but; my instinct is that the whole purpose of age (and location) verification is to track and control adults rather than kids.

Microsoft Windows Media Player stops serving up CD album info

Re: CDDB

I find that WMP os the best interface for searching within my collection, wether they be mp3, flac or wma lossless.

Re: consumers are returning to physical media like CDs

I get my CDs from charity shops (goodwill) and rip them with EAC (Exact Audio Copy) where it's only necessary to add or correct the metadata.

Saving in flac format and making sure the metadata is recognised by WMP, VLC, etc.

If it doesn't find the CD cover image use Discogs or scan it myself.

Users prompt Elon Musk's Grok AI chatbot to remove clothes in photos then 'apologize' for it

Re: Consequences

It's a tool. Are you going to ban paintbrushes as they enable painters to create erotic pictures? Same applies to other tools, such as Photoshop.

AI is just another tool.

Apple blocks dev from all accounts after he tries to redeem bad gift card

Backup your backup

I do use cloud storage but only to share photos with a small set of individuals.

Everything I've ever downloaded, ripped or photographed has been backed up locally.

One day, my 4TB Seagate desktop backup drive failed. I sent it to them and they recovered 70% of the content and sent it to me on a 4TB portable. Immediately, I bought another 5TB Seagate drive and bac one up to the other.

I keep meaning to back up my emails using POP3 instead of relying on iMap. One day...

Re: Local copies of, almost, everything here

Make sure that the sync doesn't work both ways.

If the cloud version is deleted/locked/encypted, does this happen automatically to your local version?

From Intel to the infinite, Pat Gelsinger wants Christian AI to change the world

Facts versus persuasion

AI and other inputs to conversations relate to the powers of persuasion. They use facts, conjectures, theories, and downricght fabrications as ammunition, facts playing only a minor rôle.

Europe preps Digital Euro to enter circulation in 2029

eurozone fulfilment platform

I'm assuming that the EU wants to provide a replacement of the service currently provided by Mastercard and Visa for debit cards, maybe also for credit cards.

It would need to interface with them for use outside of the eurozone.

Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told

Baloons

Baloon trip of the century. Take as long as you like, even round the world.

Legacy Update updated – so your old Windows can be, too

The bottom line question about running such unsupported OSs on antique hardware is "what do you want to run on it that doesn't run on your main platform?".

It can't just be nostalgia.

Microsoft agrees to 11th hour Win 10 end of life concessions

Re: I wonder how they determine if you are in the EEA

Running Windows Update on my old Dell Optiplez SFF automatically gave me the one year extension at the end of August.

I'm in Guernsey, which is not and never has been part of the UK, EU or EEA but is part of the European continent.

India’s IT minister moves to Zoho’s spreadsheet and word processor, urges 1.4 billion people to do likewise

North Korea call it Juche.

FCC plans to kill Wi-Fi on school buses, hotspots for library patrons

Re: Civil Vandalism

You're correct. They don't want Socialism.

Why Microsoft has the name of an old mouse hidden in its Bluetooth drivers

I grew up on BCD and its many EBCDIC children and have fond memories of cross-relating them, including the various ASCII and ANSI children. After extending this mapping to the much larger issues of Asian encodings, I was well on the way to building my own Unicode database before discovering it had been standardised.

Armed with these tools and mindset, this kept me happily employed for a decade or two.

Happy days.

Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates

Re: A strong case for two track OS development

That's exactly what Microsoft offer to Enterprise customers many of which use their IT department to install updates and firmly control acces to the external world.

The devices don't stop working, simply become unsupported.

My phone still works although it dropped out of support in 2017.

At most, vendors (not only Microsoft) could provide some security patches and satisfy the critics. Why does this have to be free support?

Will this proposal also apply to cars, refrigerators, etc?

Brussels faces privacy crossroads over encryption backdoors

Cashless society

Meanwhile, tracking your every movement and purchase. What else is big data for? Profiling is the name of the game.

Of course, avoidence of being profiled sits in its own profile category.

I'm not paranoid! They're after all of us.

Google’s latest renewable energy deal is all gas bags and hot air

Re: 30+ years?

As with all such schemes, there is the usual avoidance of the "total cost of ownership" over the total life of the project.

Bitter fight over 2020 Microsoft quantum paper both resolved and unresolved

Re: "15 separate controls that define where to look for Majoranas."

Snark rathrr than Shark?

Otherwise, an upvote from me for the alignment of quantum physics with Edward Lear's nonsense poetry.

Both spooky actions.

Network scans find Linux is growing on business desktops, laptops

Re: Security

Windows 2000 was based on Windows NT, not 98.

User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it

Re: Re:high pitch noises

I swear that my tinnitus was caused by working in noisy computer rooms in my firt two jobs atound 1970.

Re: In denial

My road awareness skills were honed by commuting 17 miles each way by bicicle across the centre of London in my first job. This served me well when I was forced to learn to drive at the age of 35 as I was about to relocate to the USA for my new rôle.

Microsoft dangles extended Windows 10 support in exchange for Reward Points

Re: How though?

I've currently got about 12k points but have mostly spent them on Skype credit which I use for diailing out to an overseas number my current £42 credit has survived the transition to Teams Free on PC and Android mobile. I've never paid a penny in "real" money.

European consumers are mostly saying 'non' to trading in their old phones

Re: Safety goggles + drill press + salt water

What"s wrong with the traditional, low tech hammer? Who needs all this high tech electric drill stuff?

If you say that using a hammer doesn't reach all the components, *get a bigger hammer*

Microsoft to preload Word minutes after boot

That reminds me of the old adage that 87.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Apple drags UK government to court over 'backdoor' order

Re: Surely a logical backdoor already exists

There are already ways to compromise specified users and devices once a search warrent has been issued.

The UK clearly want to trawl through big-data at will on a "big data" fishing expedition.

Non-biz Skype kicks the bucket on May 5

Re: Teams? Forget it..

Microsoft's announcement

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/skype/skype-is-retiring-in-may-2025-what-you-need-to-know-2a7d2501-427f-485e-8be0-2068a9f90472

Re: Teams? Forget it..

£42 for me

Microsoft trims more CPUs from Windows 11 compatibility list

You heard it here first

I assume that this is our first glimpse of the Windows 12 minimum requirements.

Rather than add a backdoor, Apple decides to kill iCloud encryption for UK peeps

Location or Network or SIM

The article suggests that Apple cripples the service for UK SIM card users.

Questions are:

Will this apply to all users of a UK SIM card wherever the are located or

All users of a network in the UK whatever their SIM.

Depending on the answer, there are obvious was aroud the restriction.

Microsoft to kill off Defender VPN this month

My only motive for using a VPN is to avoid geo-location problems when I travel.

Too many web services ignore my declared preferences for language and region and insist on showing their content in Spanish or Japanese, just because that's where I happen to be.

Other web services lock me out because their advertising revenue is region specific.

Microsoft 365 price rises are coming – pay up or opt out (if you can find the button)

I hope these comments are completely sarcasic as they're utterly untrue. Microsoft's internationalisation isn't perfect but it's very good and continues to improve.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Fried printer

Back in the late 80s we'd got our software running on IBM mainframes, including in Japanese for screens, printers and pen-plotters. We were then tasked with making the software work on a semi-compatible Japanese mainframe. All went well until an office rearrangement when someone decided that the 100v plug on the dot-matrix printer should be replaced with a 230v one. I did finally find a uk company who repaired the blown components.

Happy memories

NASA’s radiation tolerant computer lives up to its name after surviving Van Allen belts

AFAICR the Space Shuttle used the same voting concept plus a differently designed and programmed box that would take over if all else failed.

UK Home Office silent on alleged Apple backdoor order

Re: Which is exactly....

As I remember it, it was the other way round.

The USA wasn't allowed to spy on its own people within the USA so they asked the UK to spy on Americans and pass the information back to the USA. Not sure of any current arrangements.

Amazon, Google asked to explain why they were serving ads on sites hosting CSAM

Re: Why do they host ads?

Surely, that's a tautology. It's the purpose of business to make money. They're souless machines, not humans.

Any appearance of humanity comes from the Marketing and Brand Image budget.

Seems to me that this website simply doesn't spend the big bucks using the automated filtering systems used by the big players. I wonder how much they take to run. These filtering tools don't come cheap.

Microsoft quietly erases Windows 11 TPM 2.0 bypass workaround from help page

Re: MS doing their best to slow down the adoption of Windows 11

Off-topic rant.

UK biz dept overspent by £208M prepping to pay workers hurt in Post Office IT scandal

Re: Porridge time

No argument with the criticism of all of the above but *why on earth* did the courts rubber stamp these convictions? It can't be solely the bottomless pockets for lawers that the Government-backed Post Office had.

Why did no judge raise a red flag?

Apple offers to settle 'snooping Siri' lawsuit for an utterly incredible $95M

1984 Telescreen

We now live in the surveillance world described by Georgo Orwell. Telescreens in every home (and in your pocket).

The channel stands corrected: Hardware is a refresh cycle business now

Re: 'Beacons of hope'

That reminds me of the most successful busineses during a gold rush were the suppliers of shovels, food and women.

Fully agree but would choose endemic rather than epidemic.

Re: Computers for Low-Income People

Many of us here on El Reg have been there, done that with a Bluetooth keyboard, but how many of us use it regularly. Use with a tablet a little more so.