Posts by simonlb

Wetherspoons bars smart glasses from filming customers

Re: Now...

Yeah, if you use the app...

The last Space Shuttle returned to Earth 15 years ago

The Boeing of thirty to fifty years ago is not the Boeing of today; back then they were a decent company with good engineers and management culture. The merger with McDonnell Douglas fucked all that up good and proper, which is how we got to where we are today.

Millions of California-bought cars can be hijacked via Bluetooth

Re: Modern solutions

My understanding is that was common to certain generations of Nova, Astra and Cavalier and you could plug the switch in upside-down then bump start the engine to drive away, although you'd still have to break the steering wheel lock. I heard the mitigation against it was soldering a diode into the switch somewhere, which sounds logical but I've never seen it confirmed anywhere. It was a long time ago...

Pope's official prayer app commits cardinal sin, leaks 700K+ users' info

Re: I give up, What's a digit?

And lo the Lord spoke unto the masses, braking numerous GDPR regulations. And the EU responded with great vengeance and furious anger, smiting Him with a very large fine. And the vibe coding was then cast out as being an unworthy Agent of evil.

Anyone with a shed, an extension cord, a couple of GPUs and an overdraft is building datacenters. Fujitsu just offloaded five

Private Equity you say?

Well, once they've wrung as much money as they can out of these units, expect the remnants to be sold on to some idiot with too much money to someone else, or shuttered completely and sold for scrap. I'll give it three years.

Billing software error sends billion-dollar AWS estimates

Re: Upcoming price leak?

At that price, I hope they were ECC DIMMs...

Musk promises purge after Grok Build caught sending entire repos to the cloud

Re: Sure thing

"At least he's never promised to to be a low life scumbag"

I'm pretty sure he's confident he'll get that bad in about two years.

Microsoft is losing the battle to protect license lucre. It better get used to the feeling

Re: Trying...

By all means, use AI to write an alternate version of Windows whilst ensuring it's as secure as it can possibly be, but please, please, please, provide an option button to use whichever UI you prefer to make the experience at least tolerable. I can work with Win2000 or Win7, but give the masochists the options of Vista, 8 or 11 should they want it.

Philips to replace bricked Hue Bridge Pro devices

I've been saying this for nearly ten years and I'll keep saying it: We need an industry standard, open source, vendor agnostic, fully secure by default IoT protocol to control these things. Once we have that, there is no logical reason to have any third party's protocol, and linking devices together to manage and control is simple and straightforward. The only issue then is how badly any given vendor implements their security in the relevant App provided, but with it being open source, there will be multiple ones created which will be fit for purpose.

Microsoft emails Windows 10 holdouts: Fine, keep your old PC another year

Re: Wallet voting

And for non-corporate users, every week, the number of people who literally cannot afford to buy a new PC increases even more, with those who were going to 'hold-off' for a while no longer having that as an option.

Destructive Windows backdoor stuffs multiple wipers and ransomware code into a single package

Re: That headline...

Seriously, this level of vulnerability should not even be remotely possible on any software purporting to be an OS in 2026, irrespective of whether it's intended as Consumer or Enterprise level. It should really be called "Shittily Glazed Greenhouse", rather than "Windows".

AI startup that’s never turned a profit says it'll totally be around in 2047 to close its $19B lease

Re: So .....

"expected to be supported by an investment-grade credit..."

By yet more of 'other peoples money'. The AI Ponzi scheme is well past it's bursting point and the fallout is going to be horrendous.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Sticky Bits

I once unpacked a brand new 170Mb hard drive and when I powered it on it span up but the heads never moved (no noises from the actuator at all): Tried it three times with the same result and the PC reporting a HDD failure. Took the drive out, left the power cable connected and stood the drive on it's side then powered it up. Lifted the front of the drive up about two inches then slammed it back down on the desk and the actuator then made all it's usual noises. Reconnected the data cable and was able to format the drive and it worked as normal.

Have also come across stuck actuators on the 20/30Mb hard cards you used to get in things like Amstrad 1512 PC's where it would report a drive failure. You'd have to open the case, take the dust cap off the side of the drive actuator and turn the actuator spindle with your fingers to free the heads and get the drive working again.

Trump-shuttered climate change site back online in nonprofit hands

Re: Don't know if it's a shame or a good thing

Oh, it was definitely a grift, but these were good grifters. Very good. Probably the best.

Micron locks in historically high memory prices for five years

Just look at how the price of an average GPU shot up during the pandemic, but never came down afterwards and Nvidia et. al. just kept pushing the prices up because they could. Bastards.

Windows 11 can now turn back the clock when updates go bad

Re: Windows Recovery Environment.

You can't boot from an ISO USB drive and roll it back like with Timeshift in Linux?

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Re: Word formatting marks

With my OCD I have never been able to use Word (or its LibreOffice equivalent) without showing all formatting marks. It's surprising how many people have random areas of white space spread across documents they send to you, including blank tables with the lines un-coloured as well as multiple headings and format changes that you can't see. Oh, and them not knowing what F7 does either. Winds me up.

I hear ya!

Elon Musk is now worth more than $1,000,000,000,000

Along with numerous pension funds being forced to buy stock which they'd really prefer not to buy but which they now have to due to regulatory changes. And with this being a fucking massive ponzi scheme, it will not end well for anyone.

Trump phone has HTC guts. Tremendous guts. The best guts

Re: The bigly T

HTC, you were good once. It's a shame how far you have now sunk, there is realistically no return from this.

Blockbuster new Raspberry Pi project turns any screen into old-school VCR

And for anyone else in the north-west UK in the mid-80's how about: "Call Eileen Bilton on Warrington 33334 today!"

Re: Your developers

"Make it so!"

Devs know AI code is riddled with holes, but ship it anyway

Re: So AI is perfect...

So how did you train your AI? We showed it all this publicly available code that's been around forever.

Did you also tell it to use those books on coding best practices as guardrails? Oh no, that would have slowed it down and made us miss the project deadline.

Ring gets buzzed by class action for collecting visitors' faces without consent

Re: sales opportunity

Shit joke mate. Just shit.

Another bug hunter leaks Microsoft exploits in defiance of company’s handling of vulnerability disclosures

Re: Even Microsoft knows it stuffed up

"You people need to see the bigger picture"

Yet you don't. 'Responsible Disclosure' is a two way street, but when the vendor chooses to ignore the people who are finding these security vulnerabilities and bugs then fixes them and not give any credit or payment to them, what do you expect these people to do? Do you go to work every day and get a paycheck at the end of the month from your employer, or an I-O-U from them?

It also looks like you're also completely missing the part where Microsoft are supposed to credit the person for telling them about a security vulnerability and giving them payment in kind for doing so. I'm so glad I don't work for you.

Angry devs vow to flee GitHub Copilot as metered billing takes hold

Re: Who could have predicted this would be a bait and switch?

Remember, those "heavy losses" will be paid for by someone everyone else, and they will be orders of magnitude worse than any losses from the 2008 crash. However, as with all the current late-stage capitalism, none of the glut of video, memory or storage devices that will flood the market afterwards will be reduced in price for 'reasons' so your next PC will still cost upwards of $3,000 even though it will be only mid-spec. How else will they claw back the insane amounts of money bet on this AI bubble?

Microsoft tests the 15-character limit of Windows Server admins' patience

"You would need to train your windows admins"

And how can you do that when they spend all their time firefighting the latest security/update fuck up from MS?

Samsung memory workers call off strike and may score six-figure bonuses

Re: Six-figures

Conflicted on this one. Yes, it's good that they are actually thinking about sharing the profits with the workforce with a very large, six-figure payment, and it would be nice to see them receiving that as they deserve it and they are entitled to it. OTOH, if the profits are that high then that clearly shows that some of their products are either highly overpriced, or they've chosen to price gouge on the basis of, "you want it, and we have it." Profit sharing schemes are a good benefit to have in a company, been there, had it and it's nice, but when the main chunk of that profit is because the company has gone all Nvidia with their pricing 'because they can', that severely erodes any trust you as a consumer may have for that company.

There's a point where the size of the profits just become egregious and obscene and you physically feel dirty after buying anything from them.

HP investigating BIOS updates that leave premium laptop users in boot loop limbo

Re: "Purported"

Not too many years ago, you would never have heard anyone in HP ever use that kind of phraseology at all. It just shows how crap HP as an entity now is.

Techie claims Trump Mobile website was leaking thousands of people's data

Re: Trump Mobile Customers…

Did it also list their IQ? I think it was that two-digit field at the end...

Frustrated franchisee sues Pizza Hut over crappy kitchen AI

Confirmation bias?

Ok, I'll bite. Here's a scenario for you:

You are unfortunate enough to be in a car/automobile accident. You have had a limb ripped off. The paramedics are there and have managed to stabilise you. An ambulance takes to you the nearest hospital that is capable of treating you. You get there and are told, "Sorry, the doctors are only treating people with stab wounds today because it's easier and they will get paid more."

The principle is exactly the same, so is that really what you want? Or would you prefer the doctors to actually treat you?

No, I'm pretty sure the article states this is an in-house AI system that the management have mandated every outlet to use, so it is most definitely the AI. Now, if proper testing had been done for all use cases then this issue may well have been caught and avoided, but that hasn't happened. The more pertinent question here is, "Was an AI agent or system even needed?" Which in this instance looks to be a big, fat, "No."

This really does look like someone in the C-Suite decided that there must be some AI somewhere because it is the emperors new rags clothes, and they can't be left behind, even though it obviously has caused more problems than existed before.

So, in an industry where everything is controlled by processes refined over decides to be as efficient as possible, the shiny new AI allows the third party, contracted delivery drivers to cherry pick their workload and break the entire workflow. Great job. This makes me so happy when I think of all those GPU's and storage devices I can no longer afford because of AI.

Intuit axes 3,000 – without blaming AI

Mailchimp?

So that's an actual product? Wow. The admittedly few experiences I've had with emails sent to me via Mailchimp over the years convinced me it was a spam generator as nothing about the emails looked in any way legitimate. Oh well, you live and learn.

Classic 7 is Windows 10 LTSC cosplaying as Windows 7

Agreed. I've always found the Win7 UI perfectly acceptable, and liked that on XP you could switch to 'Classic' Win2000 theme which was so clean and functional compared the default 'Tellytubby mode'. I do not see how it can be that hard to have these different themes available as built-in options for the OS today, unless the underlying design is so fundamentally broken that it prohibits it. But again, this is almost certainly MS giving users what MS think they need instead of what they actually want. Mind you, it's far, far too late now and I could never go back to using Windows 10/11 for any of my personal machines as GWX10 broke my camels back and any remaining trust for MS as a company.

By contrast, the only thing that Linux Mint has done in that time period that frustrated me was the deprecation then removal of the Sound Recorder app which now requires you to do some initial faffing about in Audacity to get the same functionality that was already there. Certainly not a biggie, but still annoying.

SpaceX sets date for Starship test that asks: Did we break anything in the upgrade?

Re: It's not the Artemis III Flight...

Don't worry, I'm sure Musk will somehow manage to scrounge another couple of billion dollars of taxpayers money to supplement the 4 billion SpaceX have already burnt through without delivering anything they promised and were contracted to do. I'm also sure that he will also be "confident" that the IPO will all be done "in around two years" as well.

Musk has never built a wafer fab, but he wants to burn $119B on one anyway

Re: Blah, Blah, Blah

Jesus, sound like the type of person who also orders a 25-year-old single malt in the hotel bar then asks to have it with lime juice and an egg.

Blah, Blah, Blah

"Were gonna do this, that and the other better than anyone else!" Musk boasted in a March presentation.

Finally, people seem to be catching on that virtually all of the noise that emanates from Musk's face is pure bullshit and not worth listening to. Unfortunately, there are still those who are happy to gamble insane amounts of other peoples money to indulge him in the various activities he comes up with, even when it is obviously never going to happen. Remember, when this AI bubble explodes you can be certain that all the money lost won't be paid back by them, it'll be everyone else who has to service that debt and it will be orders of magnitude worse than the 2008 sub-prime debacle.

Taiwan cops say student's radio kit brought bullet trains to a standstill

Re: Impressive radio kit....

Slug, it think...

Microsoft's turned Windows into a cesspool, but it wants to do better

Re: They're lying again

"They've certainly gotten rid of all the institutional knowledge."

Is that a bad thing? I have always maintained that the whole design of Windows is badly flawed and should be rewritten from the ground up: Why else would updating a driver for a printer or an input device mandate a full reboot of the system? Why do so many 'updates' or making a change via 'Add or Remove Features' also require a full restart? I'm not a software engineer but there are so many basic things in Windows - over all versions - which have always been just wrong right from the start and never should have been. If an OS's job is to get out of your way and just let you work, then why have so many millions of hours each year for past two decades been wasted while that OS is 'updating' and then rebooting unnecessarily? I'm convinced that if MS wanted to, they could have fixed these basic issues whilst maintaining backward compatibility, but like all corporate entities they chose the 'easier' way which was to keep on fudging things when they could have been actually fixing them. It won't be quick or necessarily easy, but not being held back by "that's always how it's been done" might just be what they need. That and having a proper QA team. And less AI. Unless they really no longer think making an OS is a worthwhile business activity...

Re: What's wrong at Redmond?

"People didn't want Windows Phone"

At the time, Windows Phone was far, far better to both navigate and use than Android, and the majority of people I have spoken with who had tried and/or used it tended to agree. It was very intuitive to use, ran pretty quick on the hardware and had a much more customisable user interface. There were also quite a few usability features in the OS that Andriod and iOS didn't have, but that have since been included in newer versions. However, the complete lack of apps in the store was a real pain, and some apps (Facebook for one) were very basic and had very limited functionality compared to the Android and iOS versions. I was sad to see Windows Phone go, but Android these days is vastly improved over what it was a decade ago, although it still has some annoyances.

Re: What's wrong at Redmond?

The only net positive I will (very, very grudgingly) concede to the current iteration of Windows, is that it is more stable than previous versions. However, nothing else about it is positive, being bloated, clunky, unintuitive and unusable for anyone who just wants to get stuff done. That and all the adverts and AI shit in there - yes, I know you can turn it off but it shouldn't be in there in the first place, it should be something you can opt into later if you want it. An OS should never get in your way, it should just let you get on with your work.

Current Windows is probably the best worst example of feature creep ever seen.

Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone

Is this the same Home Office that just 'lost' all the paperwork and documentation for a load Windrush people a few years ago? I bet HMRC still has the full tax records for those people...

Try to convince me the last sixteen years in the UK have NOT been a social experiment on how to run a country on the least money possible.

UK drivers' agency shrugs off claims of week-long booking site smashes, blames browser configs

Re: captcha tests?

Probably testing using their own dev machines or using other PC's on the local network, not ones connecting from the internet, thereby avoiding various firewall and security rules. Also, coding for one browser - Chrome - and not using best practice methodologies either.

There's nothing that pisses me off more than having to use a site where it's blatantly coded for Chrome and works instantly, but sits around loading each page for twenty seconds when using Firefox. Browser settings? Fuck off and code it right then test against multiple browsers you lazy shits.

GoDaddy customer claims registrar transferred 27-year-old domain without any security checks

Re: Straight from the Horses Mouth

"GoDaddy's automated process (perhaps using AI) accidentally approved the transfer.

I'd hope that any automated processes they are using - especially in relation to domain ownership - are resolutely NOT involving AI at any level. The last thing you need there is the AI hallucinating an approval (then denying it) and initiating a domain transfer. It makes you wonder how many other people this has happened to...

Seriously, what is the point of using software that can spit out different answers after the exact same data has been input multiple times? If it can't be trusted why would you even consider using it?

Cursor-Opus agent snuffs out startup’s production database

Re: New form of Stockholm Syndrome

"vibecode safely in prod at scale"

Guaranteed multiple failures when doing that. If that's your philosophy of how to write code, you deserve to fail. Move away from the keyboard, and go and play with those chainsaws in that cage over there.

Magnificent irony as Meta staff unhappy about running surveillance software on work PCs

Re: Keyloggers???!!!

I'm not sure I'd be a good training model for an LLM as I usually create multiple iterations of an email starting from shouty and sweary and then progressing by steps to composed, lucid and 'corporate' enough to be sent. If they also turned on the microphone and listened to the ongoing commentary I have running throughout the day it might make them think I have one or two 'issues' and need some form of support. Some days I don't even know myself so fuck knows what an LLM would make of me.

Mythos found 271 Firefox flaws – but none a human couldn’t spot

Good, but also bad

If this is true then it's a great tool to help identify and help sort out bugs and other security flaws in software quicker than previously possible. It's also potentially bad, as some companies will see this as an opportunity to replace existing staff with this tool, which would be foolhardy as you'd still need to fix the code. And if your software is fundamentally just badly designed - such as Windows - how long before someone manages to identify a few dozen hundred zero-days in the software and start targeting those for ransom/fun/spite?

Some companies are really going to have to up their game.