Posts by Throatwarbler Mangrove

Red Planet roommates have been stuck on 'Mars' together for 100 days

HI SEAS

I'm glad to see the reference included to the Hawaii experiment. For some light drama, there is also a podcast about it called The Habitat, which makes for entertaining listening.

Ex-Microsoft maverick takes us on a trip through vintage Task Manager code

Not just me, then

One of the less pleasant elements of Windows 11 is, in my opinion, the recalcitrance of the Task Manager to take absolute control of the operating system and blow away hung processes as needed; instead, if the UI becomes unresponsive, Task Manager will either not appear at all or only appear partially. Just another of the many questionable choices made in Win11.

Search for phone signal caused oil spill, say Japanese investigators

The real story

The captain was playing Pokemon Go, and there was a rare Pokemon right over there ...

FCC plans to restore net neutrality rules tossed out under Trump

Poe's law applies, unfortunately.

iPhone 15 is too hot to handle – and not in any good way

Coming soon ...

Apple iGloves, an essential accessory for all discerning iPhone owners!

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: :-(

I'm not an engineer, but it seems fairly self-evident that when you add components to a board or remove them, then the layout of the components on the board will change, especially when one is working with very limited space constraints.

Mixin suspends deposits and withdrawals after $200m cryptocurrency heist

Re: Insider again?

As much as people like to malign traditional banks, the usual threats to them are not simple theft. Electronic banking generally practices defense in depth, and, while there have certainly been some woeful security lapses, there are usually multiple safeguards to prevent exfiltration of funds by simple money transfer. There seems to be a large segment of cryptobros who resolutely refuse to recognize the centuries, if not millennia, of lessons accumulated in traditional banking.

What luck, I get to use the quote by Stockton Rush, the late CEO of OceanGate:

"You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste . . . . I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules."

US military F-35 readiness problems highlighted in aptly timed report

I have a solution

Just solve the engine problems by equipping the F-35 with nuclear fusion engines, which I believe are also just around the corner, thus killing two birds with one stone!

SCREAM resonates in the race for the Gordon Bell Climate Prize

Re: Validation

So you don't understand the models or the science, but you feel qualified to criticize them? Fascinating.

Re: Validation

They have a Web site, you know. Perhaps you could peruse it.

As TikTok surveils staff's office hours, research indicates WFH is good for planet

Well, then . . .

If studies indicate that WFH is "good for the planet," I assume that the Usual Suspects around here will be thundering back to the office to disprove the woke Communistical dogmatic nonsense of global warming!

Scattered Spider traps 100+ victims in its web as it moves into ransomware

Re: The race is ON!

I was just thinking the same thing, that's it's a ballsy move indeed to take on entities that everyone perceives to be fronts for old-school organized crime. I can think of a number of outcomes, both pleasant and otherwise, but fundamentally I hope that the ransomware scum wind up sleeping with the fishes.

Google exec: Microsoft Teams concession 'too little, too late'

Re: Hmmmm

Except, notably, it's not really Microsoft's customers complaining but Microsoft's competition . . . who are also known for abusing their monopoly power in their own domains. It's a bit rich for Google and Amazon to complain about Microsoft using its market dominance to lock in customers when both other companies are demonstrably guilty of the same thing. All of them want the same lock-in, and all of them are happy to shaft their customers when it suits them. God help us all if any of them achieves full dominance over the others.

Re: Windows Server?

"I think anybody choosing Windows Server or SQL Server in 2023 deserves all they get."

Flexible, powerful, stable software which comes without the side order of unbearable smugness and elitism that accompanies Linux and Open Source?

Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard

Clarity

"an initiative from Ford, BMW and Honda's American arm"

This phrase highlights the importance of both the Oxford comma and singular/plural agreement. It implies that Ford is the American arm of BMW and Honda, whereas the article later stipulates that there are three companies involved in the project, Ford, BMW, and Honda. I know that the Oxford comma has been taken out back and unceremoniously executed, but it would certainly reduce ambiguity in this case, as would using the word "arms."

(I know, I could have just sent a note to the author, but by God, I am willing to die on the hill of defending the Oxford comma, and I don't care who knows it!)

Re: Voila!

Or maybe we're moving to a future where we make more efficient use of resources instead of wasting them as profligately.

US Department of Justice claims Google bought its way to web search dominance

Re: Time Compression

You may get some disagreement about Microsoft earning their success in the 1980s, but the rest of your post was spot on.

In particular, I used to work for DoubleClick when the first privacy-protecting laws were being passed to place at least some minimal limitations on what DoubleClick was doing at the time. Kevin Ryan, the CEO, was overtly bullish about the company's ability to either fight that legislation or subvert it, with no thought given to the legitimate privacy desires of the users.

Uncle Sam warns deepfakes are coming for your brand and bank account

Re: Email Doesn't Need Deepfakes

While I don't disagree, more sophisticated fake messages make it easier to entrap less gullible or more perceptive people.

Apple races to patch the latest zero-day iPhone exploit

Re: Tim foil

"Curses, foiled again!"

--Tim99

Google Chrome pushes ahead with targeted ads based on your browser history

That explains it

Specifically, it explains why I've been getting advertisements for quicklime, used carpets, and gasoline.

More seriously, I got this pop-up on my phone recently, smelled a rat, and went in and disabled all the privacy violating settings. Not that I typically use Chrome, mind you, but better safe than sorry.

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Re: Hmm.

Excuse me, the DC-8 was a product of the McDonnell-Douglas Corporation.

Do you want snakes in your mailbox?

Because that's how you get snakes in your mailbox.

Grant Shapps named UK defense supremo in latest 'tech-savvy' Tory tale

Re: Question

Thanks for the answers, everyone! Things work a little differently over here, although some appointees, like Bill DeJoy, also have an incomprehensible staying power despite a record of almost perfect incompetence and malice. We do expect less of Republican nominees, however, because an informal plank of the Republican Party is deliberately undermining effective government.

Question

For those of us across the pond, how does someone like this keep getting appointed to high office, if his fuckups are so consistent and obvious?

After injecting pop-up ads for Bing into Windows, Microsoft now bends to Europe on links

GRRR

For a while, I thought that Windows 11 wasn't so bad, but Microsoft keeps taking actions that demonstrate that they really are back to their 1990s form, ruthlessly trying to exploit their operating system monopoly to force users onto Microsoft tools. Also, Windows 11 is glitchy in ways that 10 simply was not, probably as a direct result of trying to coerce users into The Microsoft Way. Perhaps this finally is The Year of the Linux Desktop!

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

Pine and ... Outlook Express?

Pine was my favorite text-based newsgroup reader (basic, I know). Later, when I came to appreciate GUI clients, I used Gravity and then discovered that Outlook Express had a surprisingly capable newsgroup client built in, which made it good for downloading ... uh ... cat pictures from the alt.binaries groups.

Re: IRC

IRC and Usenet coexisted happily for quite some time. The use cases for each are broadly different, with IRC providing real-time but mostly ephemeral interactions across the Internet vs. the durable, asynchronous nature of Usenet. I think what crippled Usenet was that the gravity of Internet-based interaction gradually shifted to the Web. For most novice Internet users, the Web became a media-rich one-stop shop for interaction and content consumption, and my guess is that most people these days have never even heard of Usenet.

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

Newsflash!

Old Man Washed Out to Sea While Quixotically Battling the Tide

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Ironic

"Once you pay the danegeld, you will never get rid of the Dane."

What DARPA wants, DARPA gets: A non-hacky way to fix bugs in legacy binaries

Re: Forgive me, please

Sounds like Monty Python missed a cheese in their famous sketch: Italian jumping cheese.

HashiCorp's new license is still open source-ish, just with less free lunch

Only one question matters

Is stoning, burning, or drowning the appropriate punishment for heresy in the modern age?

Nearly every AMD CPU since 2017 vulnerable to Inception data-leak attacks

Re: unless I'm missing something...

It also mentions malware, which is a more general concern.

Never mind room temperature, LK-99 slammed as 'not a superconductor at all'

Re: Sounds like that's about it, then

Already taken: it's the name of my Live/Sublime/Megadeth tribute band.

Blue Origin tells staff to catch next rocket back to their desks

Re: Colleagues are distracting

I suspect that there are two key factors at play: collaboration and the perception of fairness. Collaboration is important for teammates working creative projects together and is fostered by in-person contact. This is especially true for new hires, who get a lot more out of in-person conversations than they do out of remote training. Fairness is a concern because some employees will feel resentful if not everyone is required to come into the office, so even people working solo must have the same rules applied as people working on a team, even if the solo people feel more productive working from home.

Welcome to corporate life!

Brave cuts ties with Bing to offer its own image and video search results

Re: Other solutions.

You could do that, but you would still be dependent on Google search content, which is part of what Brave is trying to avoid.

US Air Force burns more money on electric flying taxis

Re: alt.conspiracy.black.helicopters

Dude, the icon was right there.

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

I can't downvote you hard enough. The engineers for the Mars rovers and helicopter, as well as the Hubble and Webb telescopes, would like a word.

Sysadmins are being left out of AI implementation

Re: Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do...

Awesome, thank you for posting this. I found it once and then lost it. It's valuable for both the turn of phrase of for the rare congratulations to sysadmins from a programmer.

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

Re: Fake News!

Username checks out. Professor Steamhead, is that you?

Google's next big idea for browser security looks like another freedom grab to some

But people can't run Firefox because Mozilla made some trivial and insignificant UI changes many years ago and also broke a few extensions, so there's no choice but to throw our toys out of the pram and use the browser made by a company we profess to hate!

World's most internetty firm tries life off the net, and it's sillier than it seems

Missing the forest for the trees

Normally I appreciate Rupert's articles, but I think he's missing the point of this experiment (also, he's missing the point of experimentation). I see two possible objectives: 1) improve productivity by limiting access to the endless pointless distractions of the Internet and 2) improve security by reducing the attack surface of the affected employees. Note the word "improve" rather than "perfect." Many computer geeks see the world, unsurprisingly, in a binary fashion: either something works or it doesn't. In this case, however, I think Google is trying to observe whether there's an upswing in productivity and a downswing in security incidents.

Time will tell, and I'm sure the results will be interesting.

RIP Kevin Mitnick: Former most-wanted hacker dies at 59

Re: Takedown

It appears to be available on Amazon Prime, although I can't imagine that Kevin would disapprove of finding alternate means to access it.

Also, finding it took me about 30 seconds with Duck Duck Go. Not to condescend, but are you sure you're reading the right Web site? Maybe Ars Technica is more your speed.

Tech support scammers go analog, ask victims to mail bundles of cash

Re: Hmmmm

It's definitely not.

Tell me you don't have elderly relatives without telling me. I am currently trying to help my in-laws deal with computer issues after they got hit by a social engineering attack. Meanwhile, they have to change account numbers and passwords all over the place, which is confounding them. It's easy to blame the victim, and commentards do love to do so, but maybe cultivate an ounce of fucking compassion beforehand.

Beijing wants to make the Great Firewall of China even greater

Re: An Internet "passport" and "visa"

At the low, low price of no longer having an open Internet. Others have written about the Balkanization of the Internet, and that's essentially what you're proposing.

Tech execs turn to drink and drugs as job losses mount

No, just more tolerable.

GitLab deploys on a Friday and ... is down for a few hours

Not surprising

If the configuration file for the hosted version is anything like on-prem, it makes sendmail.cf seem simple and readable by comparison.

From cage fight to page fight: Twitter threatens to sue Meta after Threads app launch

Whoever wins ...

We lose.

Yahoo! comeback! continues! as! fresh! listing! planned!

Do they need a micro-blogging service?

If they're looking to expand, I know where they can get one for a percent of its former value.

Linux Mint cuts slice of 'Victoria' as 21.2 beta lands with dash of fresh Cinnamon

As someone still open to new experiences, I enjoy seeing improvements in UI paradigms and also hearing the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the crusties when they encounter something new.