Posts by Disk0

Facebook is leaky, creepy, and trashy. Now it wants to host some of your customer data

Re: Am I the only one still sane?

no, insisting on oral synchronous communication for matters that can be settled in writing without any of the hassle is insane.

The perils of building a career on YouTube: Guitar teacher's channel nearly deleted after music publisher complains

How about

Streaming platforms pay a “blanket” license fee to cover all reproduced content, not unlike e.g. radio stations and shops do, and basically charge that to the advertisers, who are the ones actually benefitting from all the content. The licensing fee could simply be calculated as a factor of the number of views, or logged time. Or, and here's a novel idea, sue the advertisers who profit from having their advert for plaid shirts pop up whenever someone mentions "the boss".

Capita Consulting ditching more than a quarter of its workforce 45 days after consultations with consultants

Well well well

Let the schadenfreude begin. Suggested lines of conversation with the laid off include:

"Having trouble keeping a job guv?"

"Aren't you ashamed, to be dissappointing your manager like this"

"So I guess that means you're not economically viable then"

"Didn't give it a 110% then eh"

"Your career is going great I see"

"Maybe next time try being motivated"

"So what is your excuse to be asking for handouts?"

"You know, you should have been adding value to the company."

"Jobhopping is like, so over"

"Have you considered learning a skill?"

And of course "Why did you get yourself fired?"

AWS scoops Intel silicon and 8TB of storage into new Snowcone edge box

Sneakernet 2.0

Nuff said.

Windows spotted flashing its unmentionables in a Chicago clothier

bugs

are in season, right?

From Amanda Holden to petrol-filled water guns: It has been a weird week for 5G

Re: A cautionary tale ...

shhhh

Re: Who'd have thought

Have you gone completely chocolate because I can't make bananas out of what you are saying...

So it's ALL the telly's fault then

Mine's the one with the neighbour's clicker in the left pocket...

BOFH: Here he comes, all wide-eyed with the boundless optimism of youth. He is me, 30 years ago... what to do?

Re: Cynical is what an optimist calls a realist...

Continuity engineer: The glass is not even half the size it needs to be, and we need several more.

Staffer representation on our board? LMAO! Good one, cackles Microsoft

Re: Not a good idea

Nothing to fear huh.

'Ethical' hackers say: It's just hacker. To be one is no longer a bad thing

It’s 2019 and

Carbon meatbag units can still be easily compromised by misuse of technical vocabulary. It seems super-flu-ooze that any of this would need explaining in the vulture’s domain, heck I’m just a dorking cracker harkening to uncorker knackered croakers, and farked fruitarian fanware out of Cork, if possible esthaetically, which is very much metrically and morally snuberior to pan testing and makes for better copy.

Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

Re: There is of course a new approach here

You're not supposed to eat them I don't think.

Obligatory tuppence

First of all there is a HAL joke somewhere in there but I can't quite figure it out. Something along the lines of "I can't let you open the door Dave" but your name isn't Dave, so I gave up.

Second of all unauthorized residential valuable movers are not picky when it comes to avenues of entry, what for doors often being locked so forcing an alternatives entrance generally doesn't seem to big of a deal in the profession, especially since they do not worry about when the glazer will have time to stop by, or if their insurance premium will get hiked because of claimed break-in damage.

Multitasking is a myth: It means doing lots of things equally badly

Feed that into your hypertext preprocessor and you'll find a

|fitter|smoker|dreamer

and of course the mythological

|r(πd)

Trump attacks and appeals 'fundamentally misconceived' Twitter block decision

Let him have it!

But no POTUS speech privileges - he'd need to abide by the same terms and conditions as the citizenry he so fervently claims to be a part of all of a sudden. I haven't read the T&C of the Tweetverse at length but from what I've read generally stuff like inciting violence, blatant racism, and purposeful misinformation with the intent to harm entire populations might gives cause to take restrictive action on offending accounts. If nothing else, they could suspend the whole thing indefinitely for "suspicious acticity" "Failure to monetize" "Flagged as troll, bot or spam account" "Reported as a landing page for botfarmers." "Tweeting too much without following enough people" or the old "Please reset your password for security reasons and set up two factor authentication." loop. If he complains, the response is simply: you wanted this. Yes, /should/, but wouldn't it be fun to see his reaction when he gets the book dropped on him?

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

Re: "nobody moved to stop a thief"

You're telling us to assume criminals in the US are mostly unarmed? And we are supposed to believe this, becaus ethere are no actual statistics of gun homicides is the US versus any other country in the world.

Do remember, killing somoene with a gun is generally against the law even in the USA, so doing so automatically makes someone a criminal, even if they weren't after y'alls pruppaty.

Take two cornerstones of British life, booze and queues, then squirt them with face scans: AI Bar

Re: Talk about solving a problem that doesn't exist

You forgot 0: Why the hell would anyone want to spend another minute in this crappy establishment where they don't serve me my favourite drink stat?

BOFH: Oh, go on, let's flush all that legacy tech down the toilet

Re: Tracking...

Yes it's called Bogchain.

Mine's the one with the rollll

Giffgaff goody-baddy-bag billing faff: Ofcom fines operator £1.4m for overcharging folks by almost £3m

The fine is not a deterrent then

Just taking a cut. Got it.

Dutch cheesed off at Microsoft, call for Rexit from Office Online, Mobile apps over Redmond data slurping

Vinger in de dijk [ATTN: Title is not in english. Translation may be needed.]

This might be a quirky local cultural thing, but our representative government has indeed set forth that when dealing with technology providers it is reasonable to consider how much spying they do for themselves, their government and 3d parties, especially when there is an increasingly dodgy regime in said technology providrer’s home country, a regime which has no regard for its own citizen’s privacy, let alone the privacy of forners in rando Euro-Shitholes cuz dems not even real gummints, there all like socialisms ’n shit and there are no good golf courses there anyway. Bless. So, it may be somewhat of a nuisance to have metadata about our citizens being used for marketing purposes, but a foreign, compromised entity guaranteed to lose, leak, sell or hand over metadata of government workers is a serious breach. I guess a vast majority of the viewers here can totally live without a sequel to the “Cosy Bear” reality TV show, it was boring and scary.

Rise of the Machines hair-raiser: The day IBM's Dot Matrix turned

Re: I had the reverse situation

Found the NiceGuy.

GM Cruise holds off on self-driving taxis for this year, says it needs more testing time to be safe

Still not flying either

They should call the whole self-deluding car fantasy "Maybe After Tomorrow Or Sometime In A Far Far Future", or MATOSIAFFF for short.

Instead just hang some fuzzy dice on your tv, use the pedalbin from the washroom to keep your foot busy and remember you are always commuting to the future in real time.

Mine's the one that looks like a housecoat, because why go outside? There's lunatics there!

Apple fakes intimacy in our dead-eyed digital world with software fix

On the upside

We can all go back to looking at whatever while on the phone, without feeling obligated to attempt to maintain eye contact with whoever is on the other side. Sure you can call me on FaceTime, just don't expect me to stop bingewatching reruns of The Avengers*.

*) no, not the comic superheroes - the ones with miss Rigg doing high kicks. Now there's marvels!

A $4bn biz without a live product just broke the record for the amount paid for a domain name. WTF is going on?

Require govermnet-issued ID to sign up

...so much better when there is a leak, to know that your actual ID is now up for grabs, instead of having to guess how much of your identity was compromised and which accounts to reset.

When customers see red, sometimes the obvious solution will only fan the flames

Re: Re Director of Security

How about “company information must be stored on designated servers in order to ensure access, compliance oversight, information security and data integrity protection.”

Any encryption key would have to be a part of the backup and restore procedures. All other encrypted files are assumed to be either malware or illicit content and will be quarantained until a key is provided, and the files are verified to be safe and legal, as per security regulations.

Re: My fav

“Help my computer is broken and has a virus! Word is scrolling uncontrollably! I can’t stop t!”

“Ok here is what you do. Pick up the binder that is in front of you on the desk”

“But what does the binder have to do with anything!?!? ....Oh.”

“In order to complete this call, I will take that as a confirmation that the binder was resting on the Enter key. I will be closing this ticket now”

...

Re: Dolt

No amount of monetary compensation could entice me to overlook that a “team leader” is unaware of the existence and appearance of a spellchecker. The only justifiable course of action is to set their keyboard to an Icelandic Dvorak layout, and to put a sticky note over the offending screen area (..the text box...).

Re: Dolt

“Let’s see your screen.” Tends to go a long way...

Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug

Users repeatedly changing things (we wrongly assume they know what they change and understand what they did) without telling support (we wrongly assume they would tell us anything relevant) and then complaining about something unrelated (we wrongly assume the complaint is about the actual problem) and never remembering what they actually did (we wrongly assume sanity on the user's part), is one of those instances that tech support procedure may not neccesarily account for. We assume /some/ level of creedence to a user's claims, or we should just hand them a Ubuntu Live CD.

Dedicated techie risks life and limb to locate office conference phone hiding under newspaper

To open a ticket...

... provide a description of the problem, steps taken to remedy it, and the #number of the asset concerned. If a function test by qualified staff confirms the issue, you’re on. Otherwise: sorry, we are not allowed to process incomplete tickets. Go ask the beancounters.

AI has automated everything including this headline curly bracket semicolon

Re: TV Timing

Back in the day yuo could tell when there was a match on, who watched cable TV vs. aerial broadcast - there was a distinct gap in the roaring of the stadium audience when one of the millionaires in shorts rolled over or managed to shuffle the dead cow balloon between the poles...

Apple iPhone sales down by double digits, Mac sales knifed by Intel CPU 'constraints'

The Next Big Thing

will drive sales much more than specs or price. Of course the crucial point is: what is the next big thing? Secure communications are somewhere on the list, as is a a personal assistant that is actively useful, lightfield or 3d photography would draw some attention, waterproof is going to be the norm soon - what else can we think of? AR glasses that actually work and don't make you look like an asshole maybe...but right now we already have 007-level tech in our pocket, and it seems only an upgrade to Sci-Fi level gadgets would get anyone excited. Stuff like cameras looking through walls, hoverphones that fly next to your head, 4K contact lenses and ion propulsion to cut daily commutes from hours to seconds.

Thank you, your DNA data will help secure your… oh dear, we've lost that too

Re: Alistair Dabbs

found the sour bouncer

Re: Hotel Security

"It would be really nice " Who the hell do you think you are demanding elevator technology to advance? Just be a good citizen, keep quiet and leave it to the experts to install an unresponsive, foggy touchscreen with an out of order message - now that's progress!

Parents slapped with dress code after turning school grounds into a fashion crime scene

My HP Lovecraft "Collection of Horrors" tshirt

...that most adults do a double take on before backing away with a pinched face as if someone is abupot to pop a can of soda in their face, barely incited a inaudible grunt at my kid's school.

They've been using the Internet longer than some of their teachers. By now it is safe to assume that the average 9-year old probably already has seen everything, if even just in videogames.

And how about htis: if you want your school to prepare for real society, that includes the view you will have as a WalMart greeter - because that is most of these kids' future anyway.

How many Reg columnists does it take to turn off a lightbulb?

Chain Hotels

Like Casinos, are designed exclusively by people with certification from the Minos Institute of Architecture, best known for it's labyrinthine structures specifically designed to keep subjugated mutant cattle from leaving....

As to the aging conundrum, I like to take the high ground and blame cheapskate corporations for under-engineering their shiny and overpromising the impossible, whenever I fail to deliver on completing the simplest tasks, like operating a supposed coffeebrewing device that seems to me like it was designed by and for podpeople. Invariably I end up with either several half-brews or one scalding overflowing styrofoam volcano. Even if it was me having a moment, by now technical difficulties of some sort are so commonplace that all you need is a bofh-style excuse-calendar. Something along the lines of: if it's Monday, whatever difficulty I have, I straight up blame on something Microsoft; since they have their finger in just about everything, this makes them a perfect candidate for shifting blame. Tuesdays? must be the evil telecoms having it out for me. The words "This celltower is sending micro-aggressions to my phone" by now resonates with a broad audience. The idea is to pick a random everyday technicality to blame, take a few minutes for percussive maintenance, and take it from the top with the affairs du jour. Hopefully I'm then able to regain my composure, find the damn information I need, or come up with some semi-believable narrative to convince people I am not, in fact, an old fogey.

'It's like painting with atoms'... Watch how boffins form armies of simple micron-sized bots from a silicon wafer

...

One-legged metal spiders Dave. They're everywhere inside you now.

...

BOFH: Bye desktop, bye desk. Hello tablet and a beanbag on the floor

selling freezers to people living in Lapland...

Think about it, they have summers too, and where else are you going to store your PHB until the tacotruck comes to pick up his remains.

USB4: Based on Thunderbolt 3. Two times the data rate, at 40Gbps. One fewer space. Zero confusing versions

Reuse, repurpose, recycle

Let's just call it Ultra-Fast Doublewide MultiMedia-USB 40.000

mine's the one with the 68-pun terminator in the left pocket...

Reliable system was so reliable, no one noticed its licence had expired... until it was too late

Re: Not only computer gear

Reverse Engineer, Redesign, Return to Vendor, Rejoice

The Apple Mac is 35 years old. Behold the beige box of the future

Congratulations!

You are all using a Macintosh now! Point and click interface, a ridiculous mouse that is only useful to idiots, the dreaded menu options, automatic device discovery.. it's all a part of the massive consparacy by Steve Wizniak to make computers easy to use.

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

Re: I can believe it!

"i'm getting an error message so I figured that was a thing for you IT guys to deal with"

"What's the error?"

"No idea, I closed it because I have you on the line now."

"What were you trying to do? Did something not work?"

"Oh i don't remember, it wasn't very important, I just thought you'd like to know I got an error, since you guys like looking at those."

At that point the caveman in me had a considerable urge to turn the caller into a cavepainting. Lucky for her however she had set me up with fresh coffee and pastries ftom the kitchen on numerous occasions, so instead I thanked her profusely for chipping in so excellently, and trying to help me with my work, but that it really wasn't neccesary to call in every single error: only the ones that jam up your work. The other error bucket we empty out weekly, so you don't have to worry.

Re: I can believe it!

"i'm getting an error message so I figured that was a thing for you IT guys to deal with"

"What's the error?"

"No idea, I closed it because I have you on the line now."

"What were you trying to do? Did something not work?"

"Oh i don't remember, it wasn't very important, I just thought you'd like to know I got an error, since you guys like looking at those."

At that point the caveman in me had a considerable urge to turn the caller into a cavepainting. Lucky for her however she had set me up with fresh coffee and pastries ftom the kitchen on numerous occasions, so instead I thanked her profusely for chipping in so excellently, and trying to me with my work, but that it really wasn't neccesary to call in every single error: only the ones that jam up your work. The other error bucket we empty out weekly, so you don't have to worry.

CES flicks the off switch on massager award… and causes a buzz

I hereby grant you this

Award for bringing a semblance of glee to those damaged and severely jaded individuals stoking the kettles of the metadata machine. Print and frame as you please!

Your mates vape. Your boss quit smoking. You promised to quit in 2019. But how will Big Tobacco give it up?

Just...go green

Nod nod wink wink

Could you speak up a bit? I didn't catch your password

Soon...

There's one and only one reason anyone would want to know everything about everyone - being a snooping perv. We'll soon enough get to "enjoy" whatever corrupt ooze comes to fall out of aussie politico's mobes, illustrating hos neccesary it really is to keep them away from the public.

Premiere Pro bug ate my videos! Bloke sues Adobe after greedy 'clean cache' wipes files

Re: What an idiot

To be fair, I've known the likes of Adobe (Et.Al.) to Know Better Than The Host System and instead of just deleting a file's entry in the directory like a normal program, overwrite the file before doing so, presumably in order to erase any possible trace of previous authorisation keys when installing any Adobe product, which seems to be the default operation for any Adobe program that candelete stuff. Just because back then they were too lazy to improve their licesing authorisation system beyond a few hidden files, that could easily be located and copied thus copying the license authorisation. Which was great for pushing Quark out of the market (their dongle-based authorisation system was famously buggy), with world + dog running unlicensed copies of their software. Having no copies of your material is just unprofessional, but does not harm others directly; deleting files that are not "yours" is a capital offense for any programmer, so yeah, sue Adobe.

You're alone in a room with the Windows 10 out-of-the-box apps. What do you do?

Here’s an idea

Make all those trinket apps run only on Windows Phone as an incentive to people who want the apps, to buy a Windows Phone.

Problem solved.

Remember when Apple's FaceTime stopped working years ago? Yeah, that was deliberate

I blame Skeuomorphic design...

...and Joni Ive’s obsession/insistance that all iPhones be subjected to it because he loves users so much he wants them to get crosseyed or get seizures from the animations and parallax effects.

Of course older phones couldn’t cope with the imagined amount of eye-candy, and Timmy “The Beancounter” Cook was of course more than happy with the concept of forced update/upgrade cycles, so it was made so.

Where normally Apple licenses all kinds of tech from all kinds of companies, and/or buys the company that supplies it, and/or cerates a new version of a piece of software that includes a workaround, this time around they decided to stick it out, because of sweet sweet upgrades. And don’t tell me an entire operating system has to be rewritten just to ping an app off a server - that's just PHB talk. A quiet payoff and an update to Facetime would have been enough.

Bitten because I made the mistake of installing iOS 7 on my iPhone, turning what once was a nicely usable piece of kit became someone else’s toy for me to look at and wait for stuff to happen.

Huawei's Alexa-powered AI Cube wants to squat in your living room too

Cube isn't a cube

...but like all Things* it is listening in, programmed to mentor you into continued loyalty to the Bezo-Maze, while you merrily drudge your days away garnering yet a few more pennies to exchange for some more shiny trinkets from the maze.

Things* should be pyramid shaped, with an eye on either side.

* Internet things ie. talking fridges, glorified toasters with legs, all that stuff.

On a more practical note, as personal assistants go, they all still fall short of some basic requirements: they stil can't make coffee*, change a lightbulb, or restock the fridge with beer...

*proper coffee, in a pot, not from a pod.