Posts by Ayemooth

Firefox maker torches Google for building Prompt API into browser

Maybe we can take a website's use of this API as a kind of "shitty site signal".

See also:

- requests to access my location

- auto-playing video

- requests for permission to show notifications

- etc

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

"why not just stop access to port 123 UDP on the machines until fixed"

Or disable the software that listens on that port. But perhaps (one might say "hopefully") there are watchdogs in place to start it again? So stop the watchdogs? Unless it's watchdogs all the way down, I suppose.

Also, under the current administration, I would be keeping quiet about being a "federal employee actually paid to watch the clocks all day", lest the idiots at the top deem the role unnecessary.

Jon

UK schools give system supplier Bromcom an F for Azure uptime

On the basis of how crap Bromcom's parent access interface is, this comes as no surprise. And who the hell makes significant changes to a school MIS just before the start of term?

Open the pod bay door, GPT-4o

"So imagine you have a system with a robotic arm, and an alien comes by, bends your arm, you crash it into a rock, something happens, right?"

Not the least-plausible use-case I've heard.

Google, high on AI, flogs Gemini for all things

Re: what?!?

Maybe it could start to detect when it is wrong itself?

WP Engine revs Automattic lawsuit with antitrust claim

"WP Engine can and always has been able to access the WordPress software and plugins available on WordPress.org, as can anyone"

Except when they were blocked about 2 months ago, per https://wordpress.org/news/2024/09/wp-engine-banned/

'Open banking' rules will put your financial data back where it belongs

It never ceases to amaze me how far behind the US banking sector is, compared to other parts of the world. In the UK we've had this for several years.

CrowdStrike's meltdown didn't dent its market dominance … yet

What period does this cover?

If the period being reported on is April to June then of course something that happened in July won't have had an effect.

Unicoin hints at potential data meddling after G-Suite compromise

G-Suite?

It's not called G-Suite this week.

Google brings more Gemini AI features to Android, saves the best for Pixel 9

Gmail search

"Further additions to Gemini will apparently allow users to ask the AI to dig through your emails and find what you're looking for"...

Aha, so now the reason why Gmail's search has been steadily degrading uncloaks! And there I was thinking it was plain incompetence.

Google paying to be default search on phones is totally against antitrust law, judge rules

But what about non-monopoly browsers (e.g. Firefox) that default to the monopolist's search engine? It's more complicated than the monopolist's (Microsoft) operating system defaulting to their own browser.

FYI: Data from deleted GitHub repos may not actually be deleted

Other cloudy git providers?

Any word on whether a similar exploit is possible with other similar services (Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc)? Or they did they consider this possibility when designing their own fork features?

It seems reasonable to me that a fork should only include non-dangling commits. I wonder what a git clone does... I'll give it a try when I'm at my desk.

J

ChatGPT wrongly insists Trump-Biden CNN debate had 1 to 2-minute delay

Are you referring to generative "AI" or Mr Trump?

Google cools on cookie phase-out while regulators chew on plans

Re: here's an idea

Really? I thought various other browsers already block third party cookies by default. I've not heard anything mention of government regulators having concerns about that. Chrome could do the same anyway time. Ever wondered why it doesn't?

Windows 10 failing to patch properly? You are most definitely not alone

Re: non-optional updates

Quoting from the GitHub repo:

"Windows update managemetn tool for windows 10"

That typo doesn't fill me with confidence. Are we sure it's not an official MICROS~1 product?

That's not the web you're browsing, Microsoft. That's our data

Re: does this only occur within the same account?

I realise I'm just a sample of just one, but the Barclaycard site works fine for me on Firefox.

I'm not sure I'd pick Brave as my backup browser, more likely Vivaldi.

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

Is it really a "plugin" if it can't be "unplugged"? At the risk of sounding old, don't words matter any more?

See also when companies use the term "deprecated" when they mean "removed".

Google password resets not enough to stop these info-stealing malware strains

stolen sessions can be invalidated by simply signing out..

"stolen sessions can be invalidated by simply signing out of the affected browser, or remotely revoked via the user's devices page."

And how do I find out which of my browsers or devices (laptop? Phone? Tablet? Which browser, if I use more than one?) I need to log out from or otherwise revoke?

How to give Windows Hello the finger and login as someone on their stolen laptop

Re: fingerprint works <25% of time

Your PIN can have letters in it. Why the idiots called it a PIN, I do not know. Perhaps to encourage people to enter something feeble?

Gulf states and 'The Stans' could become new tech hotspot – analyst

Man whose job it is to promote the 'stans...

... in "promoting the 'stans" shocker

Lenovo to offer Android PCs, starting with an all-in-one that can pack a Core i9

The linked product page doesn't mention Android

The linked product page doesn't mention Android, at least as of now. Maybe it did before, or will in the future.

Europe wants easy default browser selection screens. Mozilla is already sounding the alarm on dirty tricks

Re: Deja vu, all over again...

Or, you limit to the standards that all fairly-modern browsers support. There are always a few new CSS things that would make authoring web dev easier (and not to the detriment of users) but are not supported by enough browsers. So my staff are told not to use the them, simple as that. Sure, it makes life a little harder for us, but that's the world we live in.

To put it another way, if it doesn't work for all your users, then we don't consider that to have been built properly.

At the risk of sounding old, maybe it's because I've lived through the times when IE, Firefox and Chrome all had meaningful market share, so it's ingrained into my professional psyche.

Signal adopts new alphabet jumble to protect chats from quantum computers

Sounds like an Amazon seller

PQXDH sounds like an Amazon seller to me!

Chrome, Firefox and more caught with their WebP down, offer hasty patch-up

What about other rendering engines?

What about other rendering engines? Chrome's isn't the only one y'know!

antiX 23: Anarchic for sure, but 'design by committee' isn't always the best for Linux

I've found acme.sh to be a great alternative to Certbot. I tried it out when Certbot updated itself to a version that didn't work on CentOS 6 (because that was out of support, but we needed to keep it running a bit longer while we got stragglers moved off it), and promptly switched our other servers that Certbot still worked fine on.

IBM sells off cloud business – yes, we mean Weather.com

App uninstalled

I forgot I had their app installed on my phone... Not any more, in preparation for it becoming less useful (...than it presumably already was, given that I'd forgotten it was even installed!) and more invasive (...than it perhaps already was?).

Microsoft rethinks death sentence for Windows Mail and Calendar apps

"no major updates since Windows 11 launched two years ago"

Maybe that's WHY people don't want to lose it? It still works the same way that they showed Granny two years ago.

Microsoft’s Azure mishap betrays an industry blind to a big problem

Why not just remove stuff INSIDE your home directory, then leave your $homedir as it was? It sounds to me like you changed more than necessary, and that's where the problem started.

Unless you WANTED to create problems, in which case the BOFH offers you an onion bhaji!

Search the web at least once every two years or risk losing your Google account

Our internal analysis...

"Our internal analysis shows abandoned accounts are at least 10x less likely than active accounts to have 2-step-verification set p. Meaning, these accounts are often vulnerable"

So just mandate 2FA then, Shirley.

However, please make the option to simply use TOTP codes easy to find, like it used to be.

And don't bollocks up the process like Facebook seems to have done for a couple of my colleagues (of course, we can all think of a different solution to that particular problem...).

Atlassian to dump 500 – by email – in the name of 'rebalancing'

"The post explains that the round of redundancies is not needed on financial grounds and is not aimed at reducing costs."

Yes it is.

Meta iOS apps accused of injecting code into third-party websites

Alex Russell, a Microsoft Edge partner program manager

"Alex Russell, a Microsoft Edge partner program manager"

Is that the same Microsoft Edge that Windows users are dumped into regardless of default browser setting when clicking on any "help" links in the settings app, etc?

Yes, it's true: Hard drive failures creep up as disks age

Re: "their failure rate over the past four quarters [has] now reached 3.42 percent"

Actually the 6TB Seagate was the one to buy 86.7 months ago. Who knows what the reliability of the currently-available equivalent is.

That critical vulnerability might not be the first you should patch

"Obviously this idea has worked for at least one big company"... Either that or it just hasn't gone wrong YET. I ended up skimming most of the article looking for the magic tool the report funders are peddling that can tell me what packages actually ever get loaded into memory.

Nothing to scoff at: Crisps and nuts biz KP Snacks smacked in ransomware hack attack

Surely any ransom request would be peanuts to a company the size of KP?

Is your Apple Mac running macOS Monterey leaking memory? It may be due to mouse cursor customization

Re: Who still uses swap/vm these days?

Buy more RAM? In a non-upgradable machine?

Plusnet broadband outage: Customers fume as TITSUP* continues

No problems here in Lincolnshire.

New OpenDNSSEC doesn't want you to ... ride into the danger zone

> however, the fact that there is still not a version 2.0 nearly seven years later shows that the software, and the protocol, are still not in wide usage

You mean like that other not-in-wide-usage protocol HTTP? (OK, HTTP isn't actually a protocol, but you get the idea)