Posts by Sleep deprived

Ransomware gang runs ads for Microsoft Teams to pwn victims

Who'd want Teams?

No need to install it, just run the link in Edge when the one calling the meeting can't be bothered using Zoom. It's my sole use for Edge, which I'm not sure can be safely removed anyways.

Australia sues Microsoft for misleading M365 users about Copilot subscription options

A special offer for deceived Office 365 customers

You can get a perpetual LibreOffice licence for free and devoid of any Copilot annoyance.

Aid groups use AI-generated ‘poverty porn’ to juice fundraising efforts

Reciprocal response

To this kind of solicitation, I'd reply with an AI-generated image of an imaginary currency.

End of Windows 10 support is the perfect time for the Windows 11 installer to fail

Windows Updates no longer offer Win 11 on our capable laptops

For months, Windows Updates has invited us to move to 11. But in the latter days of Win 10 support, this offer has vanished from our 11-capable laptops. Just as my wife had decided to jump in. I'll be staying on 10 while I test drive Linux Mint on another laptop - there's a local install fest on Wednesday!

50 years in deep space, and Voyager still can't escape budget gravity

Time to hand mission control over to China

Perhaps the last remaining mission engineer could transfer his expertise to China so they can pursue the Voyager mission and recover the data while President Trump is busy making America go awry.

Square Kilometre Array is so sensitive, its datacenter needs two Faraday cages to stop RF leaks

Construction continues during operation

Workers installing the hundred of thousand remaining antennas thus have to work with a brace (manual drill) and other hand tools to avoid introducing RF interference.

Slow Wi-Fi? Add houseplants to the list of suspects

Cats too are wave blockers

A lukewarm router is an excellent spot for a cat to wrap around while napping. And unlike plants, they can follow routers when they get moved. Solution: raise routers at the top of a mast in the middle of a room or screw them to the ceiling if there's a nearby electric outlet.

Long live the nub: ThinkPad designer David Hill spills secrets, designs that never made it

The missing option on my 3rd Thinkpad

I've had a T41, T430 and now an X1 Carbon. On the latter, the touchpad is perfectly centered, and I thus have to extend my right hand further to the left to perform a regular (left) click (is this what's giving me pain in my right shoulder for being skewed forward?). As I often miss and end up with a right click, I wish I could shift the left-right boundary line to my taste.

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

I recall wiping a phone

And after that factor reset, it still had a custom background picture, despite not using an SD card. How thorough is that reset?

Meta – yep, Facebook Meta – is now a defense contractor

"Meta has invested in various flavors of reality – virtual, augmented, mixed, and extended"

So it makes sense they now invested in Trump's alternate reality.

Meta offered one AI researcher at least $10,000,000 to join up

Meta needs more than AI

AI? Meta is investing billions in it, yet can't even make simple keyword searches work properly in FB Marketplace.

Ukraine strikes Russian bomber-maker with hack attack

The Register contacted Defense Intelligence of Ukraine and Tupolev for more details.

So old fashioned. If this war took place in the USA, you'd be invited to a Signal group and provided with those details.

From Russia with chokehold: Putin says foreign IT firms still in Russia should be 'strangled'

Business geniuses at the helm

In Putin's view, US companies pulling out of Russia due to sanctions are nonetheless strangling Russia, while his American counterpart believes foreign trade equates subsidizing suppliers. One deserves the other.

Don't click on that Facebook ad for a text-to-AI-video tool

Treat all ads as malicious

No shame in using an ad blocker. That's the most sensible option nowadays. And safest too.

Satellite slinger AST reckons newer birds won't outshine stars in night sky

Mick Jagger foresaw it decades ago

Paint it black!

Booby-trapped Alpine Quest Android app geolocates Russian soldiers

Re: Very Boring Russian Campaign

Now imagine their US campaign, that so successfully lured the Trump admin.

Microsoft total recalls Recall totally to Copilot+ PCs

Why not make it a downloadable app

And see how many bother to install it and keep it beyond a 5' trial. Is M$ afraid to be deceived by how little interest this piece of code raises and realize users would rather see it spend time on fixing Windows bugs? Alas, just fixing code is less fun than writing new stuff, even if it's useless.

US stocks slip as Trump pulls trigger on Canada, Mexico, China tariffs

To avoid tariffs, just relocate your enterprise in the US - Vance

By the same logic, I'll buy Florida oranges when they move their orchards up North.

Re: Fentanyl

As if Trump and Vance care about people dying from Fentanyl overdoses. Probably as much as kids sick with measles.

FBI officially fingers North Korea for $1.5B Bybit crypto-burglary

The real damage

I must admit I'm more worried that the proceeds may be used to expand North Korea's nuclear program than to learn some tax-evading billionaire lost track of his funny money stash.

uBlock Origin dead for many as Google purges Manifest v2 extensions

Re: Could be faster and better

Not sure why this restriction on about: config but I'm not keen on running a beta as my main browser (99% of my usage).

Could be faster and better

Well, on Android, Firefox would definitely be faster if I could turn off tab offloading. But that requires accessing the about: config parameters, an ability lost many versions ago. And it would also be better if I could run extensions I want (like LanguageTool or CookieAutoDelete) outside the ridiculously small set of approved ones.

Los Alamos boffins slap blinkers on satellites so we know who to blame in a crash

I've had one on my bicycle for years

Its plate number is EEE.

National Science Foundation staff axed by Trump fear for US scientific future

Re: It's over.

Generations of talented American academics won't renew themselves when school funding is axed and corporations train their own slaves while intellectual tasks are performed by AI.

Make America Go Awry

Next step is Away in isolationism, because the Orange Angry Man doesn't seem too good at making and keeping allies.

NASA's on-again, off-again job cuts – what's the plan?

An asteroid redirect mission?

To Mar-a-Lago, the Oval office or the Trump golf course? Humm, let's have a look at the presidential agenda.

Astronomers red-faced after mistaking Musk's Tesla Roadster for asteroid

Re: AI, anyone?

Grok has probably been tweaked to acknowledge this genius move.

Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts walks free as Trump pardons dark web kingpin

Re: So, can Silk Road resume operations?

Sure. Didn't his family say he was "given a second chance"?

DEF CON's hacker-in-chief faces fortune in medical bills after paralyzing neck injury

Public health in the land of plenty

I recall attending an international congress of speleology in the US where a bag was passed around, in which people would toss money to cover the medical expenses of a fellow American caver. The Europeans couldn't believe this was happening.

Tired of begging, Microsoft now trying to trick users into thinking Bing is Google

Re: If Bing suddenly opens…

The same with Edge. Like when I hit F1 in a program that has no embedded help. If it weren't for the occasional Teams conference, I'd have removed it, if only for bypassing my default browser choice.

Microsoft Edge takes a victory lap with some high-looking usage stats for 2024

I only use Edge when it can't be avoided

The only time I use Edge is to join a Teams conference called by corporate users who don't know the plebs prefer Zoom. Any other time, I'm happy with Firefox.

Humanoid robots coming soon, initially under remote control

When I think about an intelligent humanoid robot

When I think about an intelligent humanoid robot, I recall Ava and friend in the Ex Machina movie, and the end isn't pretty. Robot sentence might not be at our advantage.

Phishers cast wide net with spoofed Google Calendar invites

Call me old school, but

I never accept calendar invites. I prefer to write my calendar events myself. Less clutter and written to my taste. Now, I learn it's not a bad habit, but a good security practice. Like not using a Google login for a non-Google website.

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

Re: All I want to know

Perhaps ask Copilot how to uninstall it

Microsoft preps big guns to shift Copilot software and PCs

I'll opt for Nopilot if you ask me

Plenty of natural intelligence at home, no need for the artificial flavor.

SpaceX Dragon gives ISS a helping hand with altitude

Re: 7/100 of a mile

Dividing miles by a power of ten sounds too metric. Can we settle for 10/144 of a mile?

New Jersey man admits shipping sanctions-busting tech to Russia

Putin's man is coming back to office in Washington

Soon, sanctions are lifted, and this case gets dismissed.

Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

Where cheating unnoticed is a quality

It's not the cheating that disqualified him from elite schools, it's getting caught.

Eric Schmidt: Build more AI datacenters, we aren't going to 'hit climate goals anyway'

Unsurprising solutions, this time coming from AI

When AI comes up with the well-known solutions of reducing resource consumption, dropping fossil fuel use, lowerng population levels and living modestly, will we apply these solutions any more than we currently do?

Recall the Recall recall? Microsoft thinks it can make that Windows feature palatable

Targeting users with Alzheimer?

That's the only proper use case I can envision. Microsoft is getting ready for an aging population.

US proposes ban on Chinese, Russian connected car tech over security fears

20th century asking

My car dates back from 2003, so driving assist or Internet connection are not to be worried about. When I replace it, I expect to favor another older used car over fighting against unavoidable assistance. But Tesla aside, do recent cars really require an Internet connection to operate, or is it just to enable non essential options?

Twitter tells advertisers to go fsck themselves, now sues them for fscking the fsck off

"We tried being nice for two years and got nothing but empty words," - Musk

Be nice with Musk's companies and get a poop emoji in return.

'One Less Car' Uber bets a grand you'll ditch your wheels

Ride-share company?

Please stop calling Uber a ride-share company. It's just an unregulated taxi operation. If you think otherwise, you'll have to ask yourself where the robot was going before picking up passengers when Uber introduces self-driving cars.

Humanity's satellite habit could end up choking Earth's ozone layer

The race is on

What is going to get us first? UV rays toasting us? Nanoplastics in our blood? Chemicals in the environment that imitate hormones? Disease or hunger favored by climate change? Or just plain old air and water pollution? Any way we look at things, we're pretty much doomed.

The end is nigh for Windows 10 21H2

Should I let this update go?

My W11-capableThinkPad is at W10 21H2 buI I set it as managed by an IT department so updates don't apply automatically. Should I let 22H2 have a go? What are the losses or nuisances? I don't intend to go to W11.

Prof asks court to protect his Unfollow Everything 2.0 extension from Facebook's ire

FB Purity still works

I connect to FB to get news from a few (5-6) cycling or caving-related groups. Of course, I'd prefer them to just run a plain website, but I understand FB is much easier to setup. I don't care about sponsored content, suggestions from algorithms or this whole friend/follower craze, so my friend-free profile is empty and I access FB through its website with Firefox and the FB Purity plugin installed. I just get what I clicked for and nothing else.

NASA solar sail to be Siriusly visible in orbit from Earth

The sail may be visible from Earth

Easy to notice: it'll be the only square object in the sky.

Microsoft to use Windows 11 Start menu as a billboard with app ads for Insiders

Make Windows an OS again

You know, that central program that arbitrates memory, CPU, I/O, tasks, etc. Not an ad vector and telemetry manager.

PumpkinOS carves out a FOSS PalmOS-compatible runtime environment

A much capable unbloated OS

In 2002, I started developing on PalmOS what became the first mobile app for cave surveying (Auriga), used by hundreds of cavers worldwide. Even a 16 MHz Palm IIIxe could execute the myriad of trigonometric operations necessary to render the cave map on screen. At the last PalmSource conference, in 2004, out of 900 participants, I was the only freeware writer. 20 years later, the app still has some hardcore users who enjoy its GPS tracking (on surface), KML maps, Bluetooth link to instruments, vector sketching, loop closure, import/export from/to various data formats, etc. for a 1.3 Mb executable, the size of a flashlight app on Android. Most people run it on a PDA, but others use their Android phone or tablet with the StyleTap emulator.

Iowa sysadmin pleads guilty to 33-year identity theft of former coworker

32 years in jail for 33 years of abuse

Proper coincidence. Don't go for less.