Posts by anthonyhegedus

Big vacuum is watching as robo-cleaners put humans behind the wheel

Remote remote working

So the humans doing the remote control will be at the manufacturer’s site. How long before they too can work at home, or on the bus, or in the pub? You'd end up in a situation where you could be chatting to a friend in a coffee shop and suddenly "hang on, I've just got to fold the cutlery or polish the shirts or something. Oh shit, I've got a dog stuck in my pincer!".

Truth be told, I'd rather have someone I'd met face to face in my house.

The whole thing is a privacy nightmare!

Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos

Trust

We have to have a certain amount of trust in AI companies, but when it comes to security, trusting one company - specifically Microsoft - is a step too far. When they aren't being incompetent, they're being downright malicious themselves.

EU lets wearables wriggle out of user-replaceable battery rules

Re: To be fair...

I agree with the first thing, but only partially, that you said. Apps should still run on older versions of the OS. The problem is that security updates change to challenge evolving threats. It might be that an older version of the hardware just can't run the latest security patches due to speed/memory/whatever limitations.

However, I don't agree with your point about payment apps. With payment apps, security is paramount. If a device is "rooted" or "jailbroken", it is compromised. Payment apps should rightly refuse to run on a non-standard device that could be running anything.

It is not "arbitrary reasons", it is "security reasons". FAFO. Keep your phone as it comes. It's your choice to change the OS, but it's their choice to restrict access.

To be fair...

...it makes sense. It is pretty impossible to make a waterproof device that will still be waterproof after a user-replaceable battery has been replaced. This whole thing will go away as battery technology improves.

What's more relevant is forcing manufacturers to provide updates for 15 years. We need devices that continue to be relevant for longer than that. There's absolutely no reason, other than a commercial one, to sell devices that physically work after 10 years but can't actually do anything, because of software updates. Don't get me wrong, I love tech and I replace by phone every 2-4 years anyway, but should I want to, they should still be working after even 20 years.

My old iPhone XS Max, which my mother uses, still gets security patches, but no feature updates. However, it's SO slow. It scrolls jerkily, everything takes a long time. There's no reason to suspect that it isn't at worst ideliberate, and at best, deliberate through inaction and/or incompetence.

Yes, it'll push up phone prices and bring down profits, but this seemingly relentless push for new devices is happening at our expense, of course. These massive companies are making an extreme amount of money predicated on selling us new kit all the time, when it's such a waste. Old devices might not be able to take feature updates, but they can still run old versions of the operating systems, can't they? All they need is security patches.

Backup and running? Not this digital sign

Re: Typical Microscope advert

Yes and I realise I wanted to write "microslop" and it got changed by fucking AI to "microscope". Apple, you're not off the hook!

Re: Typical Microscope advert

Oh, yes, totally agree, it's hateful. They do this a lot (remember windows 10's "a touch of wifi here, a touch of wifi there.." or something like that? The inconsistency of it all really gets me.

They've made a monster they can't control. So much of what they do is simply there to upsell stuff. Like so many things in microsoft 365 seem to be restricted until some part of the tenant is upgraded to some expensive thing.

Typical Microscope advert

This stupid message comes up on local accounts because the user hasn't logged in with a Microsoft account.

They want you to log in with a Microsoft account so that they can get the desktop documents and pictures folder synced with OneDrive, so that a sort of "backup" occurs. In fact, what happens is if you've got more than five gigabytes of stuff (very likely) then you'll be prompted to pay for a Microsoft 365 license so that the "backup" can continue.

It's just a ruse so that they can track you, charge you, and then make money off the people they sell your data to.

In this case, Windows isn't an operating system, it's a scam - basically designed to use your own computer as an advertising billboard.

David Potter, the man who put Psion in the palm of your hand, logs off at 82

A British success

Psion products - of which I’ve had many, from Psion software on the Sinclair QL, to Organisers, Series 3, Series 5 and even one of those colour mini laptops - were excellent. The fact that I could program my organiser II made it remarkably useful. The series 5 was powerful enough to run maps and connect to a GPS unit.

I recall seeing at Liverpool St station a shop just called “Games & Psion” in the late 1990s. It was that popular. It was the gadget to be seen with before smartphones.

And yet they lost their way when smartphones such as the Nokia 9000 series came on the market.

But under the leadership of Potter, they produced really good quality, well designed and well built devices, and it’s sad when such a genius passes I suppose. I wonder if history could have been different and we’d all be walking around with Psion smartphones instead of android or apple.

US clampdown on Anthropic models sends EU sovereignty surge into overdrive

Re: Energy Prices

I did wonder that myself. Wrong-headed policies.

Energy Prices

...and our energy prices are the highest in Europe.

I feel it's the US punishing us for not being like them. So yes, we need digital sovereignty. But first we need to fix it so that the conditions here are conducive. Scotland, part of the UK, has very good conditions for setting up data centres - wind power, cheaper land and cold climate. And taking water from the ground isn't taking from non-renewable aquifers. It rains a lot.

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

At least for the what?

It's do or die for Apple AI

Like it or not, Apple's security model isn't as much about data harvesting as Apple or Microsoft.

Anthropic co-founder hallucinates ghost in the machine

"Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom."

I think this whole debate says more about human intelligence than it does about AI. How much of human behaviour is actual intelligence, let alone sentience or awareness?

Utah mega datacenter could dump 23 atomic bombs worth of energy per day

Asteroids?

Yes but how many dinosaur-killing asteroids per hour?

Classic Outlook's Quick Steps trip over Microsoft bug

Use Outlook, not Outlook, because Outlook is better and we say so

New Outlook is designed to "work" only really with Microsoft Exchange, and even that's a pretty poor attempt. I'm finding so many stupid little things go wrong with "classic" Outlook that I recommend to our customers that they use the "new" Outlook instead because Microsoft are deliberately trying to break the old one. Bug after bug after bug.

To be fair, the new one doesn't look that bad, but it's missing a lot of the features and smacks of "this is how you do email because we said so". Gone are the days when MS adds features that people want. They're technocrats, just introducing features that fit with their grand plan, or features that are easy to implement.

There's never an "aaaaaaah!" moment with MS software. It's just about functional and gets the job done, just.

HP stuffed a PC into a keyboard. We took it for a spin

Screen? Computer on lap?

How about maybe adding a screen to it as an option. That would give the user the ability to use it away from the desk. Perhaps even make it folding so you don't have to use the built-in screen. And by adding a mode where the computer doesn't go to sleep when the lid is closed and a screen is plugged in (a default that doesn't happen in Windows - but it can be set to work like that), it would offer more or less the same functionality by just adding a £10 keyboard.

The whole unit would be usable on the go, at a desk and at home that way. And they could actually charge less for the computer in that configuration, for reasons.

That sort of setup could be used by balancing it on your knees. So it could be called a “kneesputer" or a "la-pee-cee" or something.

TomTom’s route planner takes an unplanned detour into oblivion

TomTom Go is a travesty

I think they're trying to run it into the ground to be honest. There have been complaints for years about its inability to correctly pronounce any street name with an "R" in it for well over 5 years now! They just won't fix something even the most basic satnav app can do properly. Every time I've mentioned it, they've said it's being worked on as a priority.

It's an antiquated mess, having had precious few updates in about a decade. Even the concept of loading a map into the phone's memory is a bit of an anachronism now. Certainly there are some peopke who need it, but it's hardly a big draw these days.

But now we see that its one advantage - supposedly offline working - has been broken by a problem on their servers.

There is a new, free, tomtom app called simple TomTom. They've improvd the voice, and it's online only. It's a bit more basic and it's online-only. So I don't get where they're positioning a paid-for totally different app. It seems they update the new one regularly.

60% of MD5 password hashes are crackable in under an hour

I often help our customers' new employees log in to their 365 accounts for the first time. On PCs this makes you set a 6-digit PIN, that's locally stored rather than at the server. I usually watch remotely as they type and immediately say "NOT your birthday!!" and they say "how did you know?". Then I see them type something else and it says "You must use a more complex PIN with no repeating digits or simple sequences", and I say "And NOT 123456!!".

I'm inevitably right. This is so disheartening. Good password hygiene needs to be instilled in everyone from the start. What's the use of all this security if all a miscreant needs to do is steal a laptop and guess (or find out) your birthday?

I'm talking about small businesses here without the budget or time to spend on really hardened security.

Official PCIe 8.0 draft aims for 1 TB/s data rate

Impressive

With SSD speeds like that, it's faster than RAM used to be. Well, except for the latency. But still, it's a massive leap for performance.

Should be just in time for the prices to start coming down a bit.

Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Opt out of what?

I don't recall opting in or being given the option to opt out of anything in chrome. No doubt they hid it in terms and conditions which they know nobody reads.

I'm just curious as to when that LLM is used

Claude hitches ride on SpaceX's datacenter capacity

Elongated Muskrat

Has the EM calmed down and starting co-operating with the other companies now?

Ask.com, former home of search butler Jeeves, closes just as conversational search comes back

FTFY

Like a real-life gentleman's gentleman, Jeeves would promptly and politely fetch whatever his master desired – in this case, a list of websites. several scammy websites and dodgy ads.

Microsoft beefs up Remote Desktop security with ... hard-to-read messages

Pissed me right off

This is one of those annoying updates you can't easily get around. We have a customer where RDP has worked for over a decade. Suddenly, it does two things: first of all, it asks the user to tick several permission boxes that they haven't a hope in hell of knowing what they mean, and secondly, even if they do tick them all, it asks again the next time.

I understand it's all for increased security, but I know it's secure, and it should be up to us to determine how RDP works, not Microsoft!

There's a registry fix to tell it not to ask for the permissions and to work as it did before, but it doesn't work: it denies all redirect/sharing permissions, and it's only temporary anyway until that annoying company removes the registry key.

Microsoft, you’re a bunch of arrogant pricks.

Microsoft releases first big update after Nadella's vow to 'win back fans'

A bunch of computers we support just had a slightly delayed Patch Tuesday update. In it, Microsoft have decided in their wisdom to increase the security on the Remote Desktop client. All very good and well, except they forgot to take into account that there are actually people using this, and it may not be relevant or convenient to change the entire way that RDP works just for security.

We have a customer who uses an old application that is going to be retired soon, but it works by connecting via RDP. Microsoft have added an extra dialogue box that makes you tick all the things that should be activated in RDP, such as shared clipboard and shared printers, etc. This would have confused the user, so we found a registry key that Microsoft had published that allows you to make RDP work as it USED to. Great, I thought—this will solve the problem. But no, it appears to work exactly like RDP used to, but it disables all the functionalities that we took for granted, such as a shared clipboard and shared printers. So now we've got to go to the trouble of self-signing a certificate for every computer that's going to use RDP in order to get rid of this set of questions.

So yes, I realise it's for security, but why break something that's already working? Why can't Microsoft stop telling us how to run our businesses and start producing software that actually gives quality-of-life features rather than adds more and more roadblocks along the way? So sure, this is a relatively simple problem to fix, but they keep changing things and won't stop, and none of the things they seem to change seem to make life any better. They either confuse the user, advertise to the user, or annoy the IT admins.

Buggy software, arrogant company and a shitty experience for all. Lovely, well done Microslop.

Microsoft Outlook for iOS still down and out for many after 'service change'

Re: Another day and outlook borked again

They've always been a shit show, ever since the start. Look at Windows 95. It wasn't even a proper operating system, and yet it was sold as one.

Then look at the nonsense that goes on now with things like OneDrive randomly stopping working. "Why does it do that?" say the users. "I don't know, it's just how it is," I reply.

And what about this absolute garbage of having to restart Windows every week to keep it working properly? It would be all right if shutting it down and starting it up again fixed it, but Microsoft changed that so that shutting down doesn't really shut down—it just hibernates. So computers spend months without a reboot somehow, and they end up with problems because they haven't had a restart.

Why can't Microsoft fix this? They're the biggest software company in the world, I thought. Surely it isn't beyond their capabilities to make an OS that stays relatively stable. I've lost count of the number of things I have to deal with that are just "Microsoft does it this way, and that's why it's this way we have to put up with it." I cannot remember a time when I've thought, "Oh, this is good, they've done something clever."

and quality control? They've heard of it. I don't think they implement it. They release updates left, right, and centre to their backend systems or our apps and break things every month—every single month.

OpenAI now lets you screenshot your privacy in the foot

OpenAI is slightly less untrustworthy than Microsoft

Iran has something America can only dream of: cheap broadband

What annoys me is the attitude of some people: “I’ll stick with what I’ve got. If it ain’t broke…” etc, and they don’t realise what a stupendous botch job it is trying to keep ageing copper infrastructure going. It IS broken, it’s a sticking plaster.

It doesn’t help when ISPs do things like cut off people’s phones, given them fibre and say “oh, we don’t do telephone service”.

Physicist reckons two-button calculator can do all elementary math

Morse?

You could do it all with just one button and issue commands to it in morse code.

I'm still struggling to understand the real-world application and practicality of this.

.-- .... .- - / .. ... / -.--. . / - --- / - .... . / .--. --- .-- . .-. / --- ..-. / .--. .. / - .. -- . ... / .. -.--.- / .-.-. .----

How Nvidia learned to embrace the light in its quest for scale

We have been promised the light since the 1980s

Photonic interconnects have been the next big thing for about as long as I have been in the industry. Nvidia betting on them tells you less about optical maturity and more about how utterly we have exhausted what copper can do at these bandwidths. A thousand GPUs worth of data moved by light sounds brilliant until you remember every photonic link still needs electrical conversion at each end. The bottleneck does not disappear. It just gets a more expensive postcode.

Anthropic sure has a mess on its hands thanks to that Claude Code source leak

Build pipelines have no respect for IPO timelines

Half a million lines of source slipped out because someone forgot to check their build process. If one of my clients left proprietary code in a public location, we would be having a very serious conversation. But when chasing an IPO, build pipeline hygiene does not generate the same buzz as another safety benchmark.

Even Microsoft knows Copilot shouldn't be trusted with anything important

Re: Simple AI test

Most of the AIs get this right now. Another one to try is:

I have a cup in front of me. The top is filled in, so you can't get anything into it, and the bottom is open, so even if there was a way of getting something in, it would fall right out. Most AIs go on about it being a trick or prank cup. Some even start harping on about trick cups like that being popular in the 19th century. Even when shown the cup, AIs tend to fail to see it was just upside down.

I certify that this post was not written by AI.

Downward spiral

I think MS really is in a downward spiral. They're currently running on stored momentum, but as more alternatives arrive (we can thank Trump for frightening European companies), and contracts run out, this really could be the beginning of the end for MS.

Nobody wants to use Copilot because other products are more flexible, cheaper and significantly, not Microsoft.

They thought they were downloading Claude Code source. They got a nasty dose of malware instead

The lure was perfectly calibrated

The remarkable thing about this attack isn't the technical execution – it's the social engineering. 'Leaked source code with unlocked enterprise features and no message limits' is precisely what a certain type of developer wants to believe exists. The attackers understood the target psychology better than most security teams do. Basic rule: if a download seems too good to be true, and it appeared suspiciously close to the top of Google results, it absolutely is.

AI will make anyone a 10x programmer, but with 10x the cleanup

The work doesn't disappear, it just moves

The '10x programmer' framing misses what's actually happening. Before, you spent time writing code. Now you spend time writing prompts, reviewing code you didn't write, fixing things the AI confidently got wrong, and explaining to your LLM why its 'better' solution broke three things that were working fine. The work hasn't halved. The keyboard time has. Those are not the same thing.

Ex-Microsoft engineer believes Azure problems stem from talent exodus

Institutional knowledge is priceless until it isn't

The real problem with mass layoffs isn't the reduced headcount – it's what walks out the door with each person. Every engineer who leaves takes years of undocumented understanding: why certain decisions were made, which shortcuts are safe, and which parts of the system will blow up if you push them too hard. You can't document that. You can't train an AI on it. And you can't hire it back at contractor rates a year later.

Microsoft has been running this experiment for over a decade. The results speak for themselves.

European Commission admits attackers broke into public web systems, but says little else

GDPR applies to everyone, apparently except the EC

An institution that helped write the book on data breach notification obligations responds to its own breach with "data may have been taken, we're looking into it." The rules they championed call for 72 hours, granular detail, and affected parties to be informed. The irony is thick enough to exfiltrate.

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

Trust issues

So Copilot was quietly editing other people's pull requests to insert product ads, and the defence was "it's to help developers learn"? At what point does an AI assistant that edits your work without asking, to advertise things, stop being an assistant and start being a liability? The fact that 11,400 PRs got hit before anyone noticed or said a word about it is the more troubling part.

Microsoft yanks Windows 11 preview update after install failures

Definition check

"Production-quality updates are released ahead of the planned security update release" — Microsoft

If this is production quality, I'd love to see what the development builds look like. Actually, on reflection, we already know: they call those "Patch Tuesdays."

Elon Musk wants to build 50 times more chips than the world currently produces, using 'new physics'

Elongated Muskrat

He's really excelled himself here. 10 Billion Robots. EVERY YEAR?!

RAM is getting expensive, so squeeze the most from it

Re: Word 97 is a bit useless today as it can't open docx files

So basically a community club and your wife use .doc format and windows 7.

Word 97 is a bit useless today as it can't open docx files

Perhaps with the price of RAM being what it is, programs could start getting more efficient. Why does Teams, which I only use for messaging most of the time, take up 2GB? Why does a simple website use 1.1GB?

Word has one file open - 750MB.

Ofcom sees no need for overhaul in next phase of fiber rollout despite BT domination

Openreach still gets its budget from BT. It's a bureacratic mess.

Re: Its a mess

Sounds like this is a "you" problem. You need to go to another provider, who will manage Openreach properly. You shouldn't be dealing with them other than when they turn up. There's no such thing as a £100 "fine" for using FTTC. Doesn't happen.

Ig Nobel Prize flees US for Switzerland after 35 years over safety concerns

Re: The Ig Nobel Committee

It is quite amazing. A hate-filled warmongering psycho wanting a peace prize, and an anti-vax, anti-science, conspiracy-theorist in charge of health.

While they're at it, they could put a religion-obsessed fox new personality in charge of defence? Oh wait...

'AI brain fry' affects employees managing too many agents

Tradeoff

People will only happily use AI if it's easier to manage their AI than do the task themselves. People also like to use their brains. If you don't even have to think a little bit, you get bored.

Uniquitous use of AI will eventually mean we'll still manage to get stuff done, and either there'll be more output, or it'll be easier to produce it, or both.

Re: Makes sense

Exactly what I came here to say. It's like trying to manage hard-to-manage, fairly peculiar, reasonably unpredictable interns.

And on the flipside, it helps to have a helper. Not really surprising.

Microsoft kicks new Outlook opt-out deadline down the road to 2027

Is it just me?

... or is Microsoft deliberately nobbling "classic" outlook and making it not work reliably, properly or at all, in an effort to get people over to "new" outlook?