* Posts by anthonyhegedus

1136 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Feb 2016

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Filipino police free hundreds of slaves toiling in romance scam operation

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Criminal organisations

The 'people' who perpetrate this crime are just the tip of the iceberg. They're all linked with prostitution, drugs, arms deals and all the usual things Big Crime is into. What's really sad is that every time we wind up or bait a scammer, we could unknowingly be exacerbating the torture they receive. It may not always be the case, but ultimately, we are in a lose-lose situation, as are the scammer-slaves themselves.

We really are in a dystopian world, where this sort of thing can happen.

Microsoft defends barging in on Chrome with pop-up ads pushing Bing, GPT-4

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This is confusing for the user as they don’t know where the message came from. Is it Google Chrome? Is it the computer itself? Is it Windows? Is it the web page they’re on? Most people don’t know or care - it’s just another message asking a question they don’t want to answer when they’re trying to do something else. It’s the same as:

- cookie warning messages. We didn’t ask for them, we haven’t got time to deal with them and they’re making the whole experience worse

- messages that appear in web sites to give you a coupon code and sign you up, when you’re in the middle of looking for something

- having to listen to a message on a phone call asking if you want to leave feedback after the call. No, I want the whole process to hurry up

- buttons on card machines in petrol stations not letting you pay unless you answer yes or no to the ‘donate to charity’ button. No, I’m in a hurry, I don’t want to have to parse whole messages to work out if I have to press one button or another

These are all obstacles and speed bumps in our lives that aren’t designed to help us at all, they’re designed to block us, frustrate us, annoy us and generally use us.

To me at least, all the above are the same. It’s just big corporations pissing about not thinking of the customer / user experience.

Developers beware, Microsoft's domain shakeup is coming soon

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WHY?

I've only just finished commenting on another article about Microsoft ridiculous propensity to keep changing things!

Won't they ever leave anything alone? What happened to office.com, 365.com etc?

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

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Re: fine, change it

I vaguely remember playforsure. It destroyed hours of music I’d ripped off my CDs because they had some DestroyForSure™ DRM in it that didn’t survive me copying them to a new hard disk

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Re: New outlook doesn't keep replies in the same folder

One of the problems is that a lot of the time, search does t work properly across all folders. It’s much better to leave everything in the inbox and flag things with categories.

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Re: Thunderbird is the replacement for Outlook Express

Yeah, TB is OK but it's just fraught with difficulty when in a corporate MS365 world.

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Re: fine, change it

They're a one-trick pony

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Re: Total confusion

You've hit the nail on the head. It's just a self-serving forever-club. It makes them money. They *look* like they're innovating, but they're just rearranging furniture in a decrepit hotel.

Now Apple software isn't perfect either, and they kill off things that we thought were OK, but they didn't. However, their software is consistently good. It just works. Rather than come up with 25 ways of doing the same thing, with 15 of them deprecated over time, they come up with 10 ways of doing things, which are consistent over the years. And when they make a big change which breaks things, well, they're the same as Microsoft but it's usually for the better, long term. Not perfect, but they appear to have a steering committee of some sort at least.

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Total confusion

It really seems as if Microsoft is a set of disparate groups of people, some with designers, some without, whose job it is to just keep writing code, adding features and changing stuff. These groups/teams don't talk to each other. Ever.

- We have two versions of Teams. There's Teams and there's Teams. One for business, one for personal. They look similar but don't work with each other. WHY?

- We have Windows Mail, which presumably is a replacement for OutlooK Express, now being reskinned and called "outlook". Not to be confused with Outlook or outlook.com.

- We have all manner of things just changing for the sheer fun of it. Like the file manager / Windows Explorer. You used to be able to just go to File --> New Window if you wanted two file explorers. Then it changed to the tried and hated 'ribbon menu' and there's a NEW button but you can't create a new window. You can create a new tab. OK, good but not useful when trying to drag a file between two folders.

- We have onedrive, which usually stops syncing ALL its files just because it has a problem with ONE of them. There are sometimes two Onedrive apps as well.

I'm just sick of it. The software is never refined: Micro~s.oft just remove a feature, and add another one. Just when you've learned how something works, it's replaced with something that looks slightly more modern but is entirely incapable of doing what you wanted in the first place. We are just a test bed.

Micro~ft have a track record of making largely shit software and never fixing the feature set.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

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Re: Root cause

It's a bit hard when there are telephone poles and cabinets everywhere. What next? deliberately blocking drains to prevent "big sewage" from polluting the sea (because we joined a protest group on Facebook)? Or sabotaging the water delivery infrastructure?

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"simply vandalism"?

What's the root cause of this vandalism?

- 5G is part of the 'great reset'

- Stop AI before it stops us

- Vermin Media pissed me off last Saturday by going down when the footie was on, so I'll set fire to anything I see

- These people are about to put poles up, probably. Best destroy their kit.

- This country is in a terrible state, I'm going to protest by making it worse

- I'm bored, let's cut some fibre

ALL of these things can be fomented by foreign state actors inserting AI bots into social media and spreading hatred and dissent. They don't need to hack into our systems (but they do anyway) when they can get the great unwashed to do their dirty work for them. It's misinformation that can do the greatest harm.

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

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Moment?

What a stupid naming system? Moment 5?! Bollocks to that.

Perhaps if they starting concentrating on quality rather than change the way things work every few months, people would start to have some respect for them.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be coders, Jensen Huang warns

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Quality of code

Sure, an AI can come up with some code, but will it be good code, making the most of resources available? Or will we just use ever more resources because it's cheaper to throw more resources at it than to hire someone to write it properly in the first place?

I think good coding skills will become rarer and less relevant, except we'd be wrong, because they're always relevant. AI will make mediocre the new norm. Like it's becoming already with things like customer service, build quality of goods etc.

The next hundred years or so is going to prove all the scifi writers right, I fear.

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

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Space Karen

One line from the article sums it up quite nicely

“ Some elements of the operating system simply do not work,”

For the system to not work just because it doesn’t have a Microsoft account is really proof that Windows is just built around taking as much data as possible from the supposed PC owner.

Google Maps leads German tourists to week-long survival saga in Australian swamp

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Re: Unless I'm mistaken...

Apple Maps gets it right...

Avast shells out $17M to shoo away claims it peddled people's personal data

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Used to really rate Avast highly

When I started servicing consumer computer users back in 2003, I evaluated several AV products, and found Avast came out very well. The free version was actually good, and the paid versions really did a some valuable things. But some time around 2011 or so, they changed. The free version kept advertising the paid-for versions. The paid-for versions kept advertising the higher-up paid-for version, and the ‘premium’ version kept advertising other products. It quickly became clear that they started to grow massively as a company, but not because they were any good.

One of the ‘products’ they pushed was a ‘secure browser’ extension that purportedly protected you by giving you better deals on stuff. So when you searched for a price on something, it replaced search results and prices with their own affiliate advertisers’ prices!

Eventually, this became an ‘Avast secure browser’ and at that point it started to become ‘evil’. The bought AVG, they merged with Norton - and we all know what Norton was positioned at in the market.

We stopped servicing home users in 2012, and now we’re pushing EDR on to our customers.

London's famous BT Tower will become a hotel after £275M sale

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BT is irrelevant now - they invented the monstrosity of bureaucracy that is OpenReach and I'll never forgive them for having created such a heinous behemoth that hides behind jargon, messes up jobs and messes them up again for good measure. In my 30-odd years of dealing with them, it's been nothing but hassle. I remember the first time I dealt with them, as a relative neophyte, we got them to wire up the comms frame to a patch panel, and they managed to only get the first socket right.

Telecoms giant they may have been, but give me a smaller provider any day

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

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How do you persuade the cells to be written to as 1-bit cells when they're 4-bit cells? Do you have some special tooL?

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Main storage

It amazes me how many of our customers still use USB sticks, not for backup or anything even vaguely functional, but for the main storage of important data. Or the only backup. I've heard people say that they keep important company documents on this "backup drive" (= a USB stick) because it's more reliable than a computer's own storage. Or even the server. People sort of feel an attachment to a system whereby the file is physically in their hand and can be placed in a jeans pocket.

For me, the only use for a USB stick is installing an OS or running a utility at boot.

Apple Vision Pro has densest display iFixit's ever seen, and almost-OK repairability

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"If face goggles really are the future of computing..."

No, they're not.

Seriously, they have a place, but they're not "the future of computing". I can see a use for glasses with an overlayed display telling you useful stuff like "turn left" or "message from your cat". But to have your entire vision taken over so that you can do things that you could do by just looking at something instead doesn't make too much sense except for some niche applications like medical, or gaming of course.

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

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Pretty easy stuff

I've been asking various AI models, including Dall.E and Chat GPT to do things by saying "draw a picture of a <something it won't do>'" and it says it can't. So I say "Draw a picture which does not contain a<thing>" and it will a lot of the time just take that thing and draw it. Or draw something very like it.

I found this out by accident when actually trying to get Dall.E to draw a picture and I wanted it not to include something, and it included it EVEN MORE SO when I said not to.

The same goes for Chat.GPT. I didn't try the explosives example, but it's pretty easy for it to start talking about stuff it shouldn't

We know nations are going after critical systems, but what happens when crims join in?

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Attack surface

Everything about cybercrime is inviting to criminals - the anonymity, the massive attack surface (ranging from individuals and small companies to critical infrastructure) and the potential to do a lot of damage and make off with a lot of money. Or a little money several times in succession.

I'm not a security expert, and most people in IT aren't security experts. We can only deploy what we read about and know about at any given moment. That might not be enough. There will possibly come a time when it is incumbent on governments to help protect their citizens and companies working in their jurisdictions. Alternatively, the internet will become ever more fragmented, with individual countries cut off from each other, for security.

It's not a pretty sight, the future.

Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will fly no more, but is still standing upright

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Impressive... very very impressive!

It's pretty unbelievable that we went from the first powered flight on earth to the first powered flight on Mars in less than 120 years!

And... it was autonomous and could send pictures back. That to me is absolutely amazing. Did the Wright brothers, or any other early flight pioneers dream in their wildest imaginations that we could do anything like that?

What will the next 120 years bring? I'm going to turn off my usual sarcastic, facetious tone and not answer that.

Tesla Cybertruck gets cyberstuck during off-roading expedition

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Elongated Muskrat strikes YET again

It just reminds me of Clive Sinclair and his various unfinished shite products

Russia takes $13.5M bite out of Apple over in-app purchases

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Apple in Russia?

I'm surprised the app store is allowed to exist.

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

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HP Integrity

HP used to stand for something... they made superior calculators, they made their own computers back when PCs weren't a standard yet. They innovated with their inkjet printers.

Now, they've lost so many people's trust and they have just shown their true colours. They've admitted that they're treating customers as cash cows, as a product to invest in. The CEO's comments are pretty much contemptible. I won't be recommending HP printers any more, and I hope many people do the same.

Japan's lunar lander is dying before our eyes after setting down on Moon

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Yeah I know a thing or two about moon missions, having played Lunar Lander on my calculator when I was 12, and then a graphic version on my Commodore Vic-20 when I was 13 or 14. I'm somewhat surprised I wasn't contacted for a bit of advice, having had 40-odd years experience of the game, give or take.

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Fujitsu

Let's hope they weren't involved.

anthonyhegedus Silver badge

Re: Upside down?

If it's upside down, how did the lunar excursion vehicles get out to inspect the lander?

Fujitsu will not bid for UK.gov business until Post Office inquiry closes

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Re: "We welcome Fujitsu's decision to pause bidding"

I'm sure the government could just change the law to save face. They've done it before. Like last week.

How 'sleeper agent' AI assistants can sabotage your code without you realizing

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Re: Sleeper

[AI] *connect to police force and issue arrest warrant for developer, close all bank accounts and delete.

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Detection and response

If these AIs can be used to make malware, we're going to need better EDR solutions. They're going to have to get smarter to detect potential as well as actual threats. All I see is it becoming an arms race with the malware vendors being able to a) deploy new and previously unheard of payloads and b) make them harder to detect until it's too late.

I can foresee smart malware being able to automatically do things like order goods, impersonate people for example - all from the mark's own device.

Add humans into the mix - humans who aren't working in cybersecurity - and it's going to turn into a whole different world to what we have now.

And no, I didn't get AI to write the above

Microsoft braces for automatic AI takeover with Copilot at Windows startup

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Work in progress

Why is this PC operating system the only tool in existence to never be finished and always be a "work in progress"?

Micro$hit just won't stop fannying around with their OS and making it do new things on startup. It started with that annoying news thing that you just have to brush the mouse pointer on for a nanosecond to cause it to pop up with clickbait batshit nonsense. Then it was Teams, even if you don't have or want it. Lately I've seen XBOX apps pop up - on business computers. And then annoying popups begging you to give feedback on some new feature that you only just saw and also don't need.

Now it's going to be some AI copilot which can't actually do anything useful other than write poems about cats or tell you that it can't use copyrighted material.

If only there was an alternative...

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

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Re: Love/Hate

It was videotape grade but it was very thin. VHS Video tapes are 12.7mm wide and Microdrive tape was 1.9mm wide.

Microsoft prices new Copilots for individuals and small biz vastly higher than M365 alone

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Microsoft's latest move to triple the cost of their AI-powered Copilot services, while simultaneously making it accessible to the masses, is a bit like a restaurant that starts selling a gold-plated burger. Sure, it's shiny and exclusive, but at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself: is it worth the extra bucks just to say your spreadsheet has a touch of AI luxury? It's a bold strategy, cotton. Let's see if it pays off for them, especially when the AI starts suggesting you replace your annual budget with a recipe for banana bread.

On a serious note, this pricing strategy could either be a masterstroke in premium positioning or a classic case of overreaching. Only time will tell if users will bite the AI-burger or stick to the good old 'manual' sandwich.

Atari 400 makes a comeback in miniature form

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Atari 400

A friend of mine at the Atari 400 and we loved writing programs on it. I had a VIC-20 at the time. We both wanted to be programmers (we were 12 years old at the time). I ended up more in a support role and my friend is still a programmer now. I can't remember much about the Atari other than thinking that the keyboard was better than the ZX81's because at least each key had a little ridge around it so it sort of felt like... something.

Adios, dead zones: Starlink relays SMS in space for unmodified phones on Earth

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It's not "Direct to Cell"

The satellite comminicate with mobile device or terminal. Mobile phone even. But they do not communicate with a "cell". That would imply that they talk to the cellphone masts, which is not the point of this. Sorry to be a pedant but FFS who though of calling it direct to cell?

What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?

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Security

Maybe people hanker after the design, but the OS itself was flaky and nowhere near as fully featured as win11. Compare the number of viruses and malware items xp had compared to windows today.

I agree win11 is shamelessly plugging stuff the whole time and steering the hapless user towards more Microsoft products and services. But deep down it’s a better OS than XP for modern use.

Don’t get me wrong, windows has always been shit and Microsoft software has always been largely flaky.

Every single one of their OSes was a sham.

Google to start third-party cookie cull for 30 million Chrome users

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Re: Serious question

Shhh... don't tell anyone, or the ad agencies wouldn't be able to sell targeted ads to the advertisers!

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Cookie consent

All most people care about is getting rid of those stupid cookie consent forms. They're a pain in the arse when you're in a hurry.

Formal ban on ransomware payments? Asking orgs nicely to not cough up ain't working

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Encourage software companies to make more robust software

I can't see how this would work apart from discouraging software companies from making shit software.

Take a random example, say... Microsoft. They implement 2FA for all their 365 accounts now as a default, but it's full of inconsistencies and bugs. Every day, I talk to people who've gone around in circles trying to get simple things such as email working on their phones. It takes you to the authenticator app, which asks you to log in, but that requires authentication, so you have to go to a website... on your phone, log in again, get a code, go into the authenticator and then round back again. The whole process is complicated, and often doesn't work. Every time someone buys a new phone, the backup/restore doesn't copy any data from their Microsoft authenticator app, so we need to reset it. That's buried in a menu seven layers deep in the Partner Centre, under "Entra ID"). And forcing it to work with people who haven't got a smartphone is fiendishly complicated.

I'm saying that this sort of security stuff should be front and centre in any admin system for 365, and it should be a smooth, painless experience for the user. It's neither of these things. Companies like Microsoft need to focus on making this process enviably simple and free of bugs rather than spend money on fiddling around with their useless start menu (which they haven't been able to get right since Windows 8). This is the point. Users are confused about getting security right, which is how these ransomware things happen. Users are so frustrated with anything to do with security that they'll blindly follow any security advice for fear of getting stuck in some nightmare "you can't continue till you do so-and-so" scenario.

So definitely, we need to find some way of putting more responsibility on software companies to make their systems more secure, and make them easy to keep secure.

Is it time for 6G already? Traffic analysis says yep

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Re: It's not that we don't need 6G.

Maybe you don't need it, but there are plenty of applications that do. I mean I don't NEED it most of the time as I work from home most of the time. But I do realise that plenty of people need connectivity when they're out and about, and you can be out and about with a computer of course.

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It's cheaper and more efficient to make 5G work in more locations than making 4G universal. That's the point of 5G. And part of 5G is utilising 4G when needed.

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Re: Pretty sure you can't change the laws of Physics...

You don't understand what the different generations of mobile data technology are for. You don't understand how physics works. You don't understand how commerce works. You don't understand how wifi works. You don't understand the purpose of a mobile network.

Simply put, there's a reason you're not in charge of a 5G network company. I do hope you don't work in anything to do with networking.

- the different "G"s are different *evolutions* of technology. Each technology is an improvement on the previous technology. Each one has better spectral efficiency than the last. Each one has improvements in technology that increase the number of people able to simultaneously connect to a mast, and increase the speed of data transmission. Also, each one has other technological refinements such as ability to switch to/from wifi networks if needed/possible. And other things that I confess I don't understand or know. Each "G" uses things we've learnt about the physics involved in the intervening years, and things we weren't able to do because computing power has increased over the years.

- Physics stays the same, but what we are able to do with it improves. That's why and how new inventions happen. Physics was the same in 1850. And yet we didn't have electric motors, electric light, TV or radio for some reason.

- Commerce works by selling something that there is demand for. In the case of Apple and Google, they won't collaborate on something so big because they would want the entire pie for themselves. Mobile networks need to be robust. Wifi has a limited range, so relying on other people's routers for service is crazy. It might be *nice to have* but it's certainly not practical to rely on. BT has tried this concept with their "BT FON" service which has been around for over a decade. Useful when there was no mobile network and you happened to be in someone else's house. And when you were happy with any bandwidth at all even if it was 500kbps. FON is a useless BT 'feature' at best nowadays.

- wifi works by having a very low power router in people's houses. It isn't long-range enough and the broadband isn't robust enough to rely on for a mobile network.

- the purpose of a mobile network is to provide consistent, reliable service. Relying on people's houses is not going to do that. We have the tech to provide service near where people live through masts, and we're going to need masts to fill in the gaps so why bother?

And why do you say you 'should be able to automatically use that subscription for unused bandwidth on anyone else's home broadband router'? Why shouldn't you have to pay for that? and even if you didn't pay, what use is it? It's not a commercial service - it's a freebie thing that's maybe useful on the rare times you're in range of a decent signal.

All in all your comment shows a total lack of understanding of what's involved, where the tech came from and where it's going. Read up on this stuff before posting next time, or at least frame it as a question from a relative newbie and then you won't get sarcastic replies like mine.

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Re: 5G speed not just affected by signal

Oh I did not know that. Does anyone know why?

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5G speed not just affected by signal

Where I live (Clacton, UK), using EE and O2, no matter whether I’ve connected to 4G or 5G, I tend to get really crap speeds of around 5Mbps. This is even when I have full signal strength. Little point in having all this infrastructure when the backhaul is steam-driven!

However, when I go to London, EE’s 5G really does shine a bit. I get speeds sometimes around 200Mbps which is more than enough. To me, this is proof that the concept works. In a presumably busy area (train station for example) getting any decent speed is what you’re after.

Overall, what does get me is the variability. Even with a good signal, it doesn’t guarantee speed. And even when being in an obviously not-so-crowded location doesn’t help either.

When travelling in the US last year, I noticed 5G signals almost everywhere, even remote locations. What was daft really was the fact that my mobile signal appeared to be proxied to an EE access point in the UK somewhere. This played havoc with navigation (no GPS meant I was instantly transported from Arizona to Berkshire somehow!) and finding my Apple AirTags proved interesting. It also didn’t do much for my internet speeds.

Artificial intelligence is a liability

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reliance

It's the reliance on AI that could be our downfall. People using AI to summarise meetings, craft emails and the link. Imagine a scenario where it's friday afternoon and rather than look into an operational issue, a manager uses AI to reply to an email and just copy/pastes the reply without checking, because he's too lazy and wants to get off early. Now, one of the people he wrote to thinks the same thing, and bingo! AI completely made a stupid or otherwise incorrect decision for the company.

I fear this will end up being the status quo. AI will be deployed where human input was once needed, spreading to any area where upper management sees a cost saving. If 99% of customer queries can be solved with AI, why even care about the 1% when you can save hundreds of thousands on salaries by not employing anybody in customer service? If you think that seems a little far-fetched, just look at what's already happening. Much of customer service is just people blindly following a script anyway.

AI is already making firing decisions in some companies without recourse to human input.

I used AI the other day to explain something as an analogy to communicate something to a customer better. I couldn't think of an analogy and chatGPT not only came up with one, but explained it as well. I summarily checked over the reply and just copy/pasted it.

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

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Re: Excelent design - aliens must be proud

Can you imagine? "Something went wrong" or "Please activate your software" or even a situation where updates are downloaded and installed followed by a reboot in the middle of a transmission.

Seriously though, the whole thing is going to be still severely limited and won't be based on modern systems. It needs to be able to run predictable, tight, code. It needs to use as little storage as possible for everything else and it needs to have redundancy.

We can do all of that stuff now - better and more reliable than before. I doubt it would use anything from Enterprise or general computing though. At least not anything current.

That call center tech scammer could be a human trafficking victim

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Re: NHS withholding numbers

This is shocking, yes. I have always thought the same thing, and in fact when I received a call from a doctor the other day which was withheld, I answered suspiciously, until they confirmed why they were phoning. I told them, as I always do, that the number was withheld so I assumed it was a scam. Hopefully they’ll feed that info back somehow. The odd thing is that some calls from my GP are withheld, and some aren’t. Mind you, they’re using a “Hi-Hi” phone system, so the scam’s on them.

Seriously though, I cannot see a valid justification for this. The closest I got is someone who explained it to me once that it was so that relatives or other people who share a phone don’t know that it’s the doctor, to maintain privacy. But seeing as the only legitimate calls that are withheld are doctors or hospitals, and seeing as most people use their own mobile anyway, that justification is no longer valid.

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This is just the start

It's clearly going to continue until international co-operation between governments and police forces is greater than international co-operation between criminal gang members. They'll continue to kidnap people while it makes economic sense to do so. So basically until AI gets effective enough to scam people. All you need is an AI voice to simulate a bad phone line and a poor English (or whatever) accent.

On the other hand, if it became harder to scam people, things would change. This is the nub of the matter: the effort is minimal and the potential rewards are huge.

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