Posts by benderama

OK, Google: Are you killing Assistant and replacing it with Gemini?

I tried really hard to use my echoes in the way Amazon wanted. The audio never matched what I said, and the more we tried to use it the more it kept pushing sales onto us or other devious prompts to enmesh even further into the ecosystem.

Our echo shows are amazing - when they’re showing the content we want. The problem is some stuffy product manager gets new toggles and landing screens added all the time. So while we see pics that we wanna see, we suddenly get landing screens for Amazon Prime or shopping foisted on us. I spend another twenty minutes finding the new toggles, the landing screens go away for a while, and then the process repeats.

That’s why Echoes aren’t taking off. Poor response, continually having our settings overridden. Apple should be better in this respect.

Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks

They’re not sucking up your data.. they have a list of hashes for different landmarks (Eiffel tower, Sydney opera house). AI on your phone looks for potential landmarks. The AI and the servers talk. Yes it’s a landmark. No it’s not. They don’t keep track of what landmarks are on a device, they don’t track who was there. They don’t know if you were there with your wife or your girlfriend (or both!)

They could tweak it so the landmark hashes are in your local AI. This may be in an attempt to ensure we’re all matching against the same data for better results integrity

Apple and Meta trade barbs over interoperability requests

Only one of these companies had to change their name to disassociate from the heinous activities they performed over the years. And that’s just the stuff we know about.

Trump's pick to run the FCC has told us what he plans: TikTok ban, space broadband, and Section 230 reform

If the big players have to post everything, so do the little guys. Xitter and truth social won’t be able to block countering views, yeh?

OpenAI reportedly asks Broadcom for help with custom inferencing silicon

“Let’s make Nvidia think we’re going elsewhere so they lower the prices for us instead “

Millions of Android and iOS users at risk from hardcoded creds in popular apps

Thought it was gonna be important apps we all have. Not by the sound of the examples listed!

Top-secret X-37B space plane ready for daring new orbital maneuver

Just makes you wonder what they can hide behind the fleets of starlinks radio-flood fleet(s), you know, the ones made redundant by the department of redundancy department.

The .io domain isn't going anywhere anytime soon amid treaty

If domains like .google can exist, surely a home for .io can be possible too?

White House thinks it's time to fix the insecure glue of the internet: Yup, BGP

Am I oversimplifying by thinking of this as internet3 (or would it be 4 if i3 was the ipv6 roll out)?

Using 1Password on Mac? Patch up if you don’t want your Vaults raided

Re: Why aren't CVEs noted in1P release notes?

If “the threats” don’t know what is being fixed in the new release, they don’t know what to target for users on older versions. And they won’t know what to probe to see if the new version is truly fixed.

In theory. I dunno. I use post-its

New York Times source code leaks online via 4chan

If they’re using AI it could be LLM training data. Maybe?

Brit publishers beg Apple not to hurt online ad revenue

Surfing websites is nearly impossible these days without an adblocker. Even worse if you have multiple tabs open.

Future Roku TVs may inject tailored ads into anything and everything when you pause

Getting dangerously close to losing me... The Roku tv OS has started to drag with all the forced ads and theme changes, and who knows what other telemetry is going on in the background that wasn't there years ago

Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

I’ve used blockers for years. Early on I had convinced clarkconnect to include adzapper for this purpose. Then I kind of relaxed about ads thinking “ok sure, necessary evil”.

And then I found out that they could track where my mouse moved on the screen, how long it hovered, or even where I touch the screen on my iPhone and iPad. And then that was enhanced by the way Facebook was “experimentally” recording keystrokes, so if you wrote a comment and decided to delete it THEY STILL HAD IT IN THEIR SYSTEM and gave it to brainiacs to work out why i (“the user”) didn’t pull the trigger.

I insist on blockers now. They did this to themselves. All of them.

Re: Hahahahahahahaah!

Don’t forget 7 proxies and a dns gosh

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Re: Just a thought

Do you want to teach the public how to take over a satellite? You know there’s at least one nutbag with the tools to sniff the traffic who will try to run Doom on V’ger

We're not Meta support: State AGs tell Zuck to fix rampant account takeover problem

The reliance on bots and walls of support text instead of a human to interact with is perhaps starting to bite these companies. Just try and get someone useful at Google, Facebook..

Lukewarm reception for Microsoft's Copilot Pro amid performance, cost grumbles

I already pay $20/m for chatgpt, and I have an annual license for office ($100?). I use Google mail as my primary, and mac as my primary device.

Why would I spend another $20/m on 365 copilot? What am I not noticing here?

Zuckerberg hunkers down in Hawaii to wait out apocalypse

This is the one we know about. It’s a decoy.

Google pencils in limited third-party cookie purge for January

I don’t think we’ll see it in our lifetime, but a marketing-free internet would be amazingly faster. I disabled my blocker recently for an hour or two. Ugh.

When you’re shown 4 ads around one small paragraph, and all the ads are for the same thing, something’s gotta change.

Roblox investor plays hardball over 'weak' parental controls

Something absurd about “rich people” legally crying about not stealing enough money from little kids and luddites

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

Oh the marketers dont like it?

Good. As an industry, marketers can rot. They’re about as useful as a glass of water while standing on the sun. And if any marketer is here, you can go to the sun at night when it’s cooler…

But as people yeah you’re ok. It’s just the industry.

Brainwaves rock! Scientists decode Pink Floyd tune straight from the noggin

So, could they discern whether the song was being listened to or whether the participants were just singing along in their heads?

How many of the participants knew the song prior to the study, how many were not aware of it?

Voyager 2 found! Deep Space Network hears it chattering in space

Re: October 16th

A documentary has already been made showing VGERs dismay at finding so many carbon units on the creator’s home.

Netflix offers up to $900,000 for AI product manager while actors strike for protection

35 people?

In what location would $900k pay for 35 humans and give health care to their families? Certainly not San Jose, where Netflix is homed, nor Hollywood or New York where many of the filming giants are located.

Meta CEO doesn't Zuck at Brazilian jiu-jitsu, apparently

Up-coming John Wick sequel? Do you mean The Continental, which is a prequel series?

Substack copied Twitter so Twitter is copying Substack

Simpsons said it best

Muskrat isn’t gonna play nice and give real answers to legitimate questions. So stop reporting he isn’t answering. Take his rebellious response and use it against him - don’t talk about it.

“Just don’t look, just don’t look!”

LLaMA drama as Meta's mega language model leaks

Facebook releasing a product to minimal audience with widespread appeal? Gosh, doesn’t that sound like something they did in their startup days?

But then again, “restricting” its release just makes it easier to deny responsibility when something major goes bad.

Zoom chops president it hired less than a year ago

Unless you're bringing something truly unique, I dont understand why you would want to go up against the "free" tools of Hangouts and Teams. "Free" as already included in subscriptions, "free" as in people use it in their free time anyway.

Backup tech felt the need – the need for speed. And pastries and Tomb Raider

It was busywork to keep slackers away from real duties, while keeping them near enough to be scapegoats in an emergency

Basecamp details 'obscene' $3.2 million bill that caused it to quit the cloud

Re: "Most of that spend – $759,983 – went on compute"

How much for someone who knows what they're doing and don't need to practice any more?

Atlassian comes clean on what data-deleting script behind outage actually did

well

The initial deletion script did exactly as it was supposed to do. The error, as always, was human. Humans provided the incorrect IDs for deletion, humans failed to prepare a feasible restore process.

They should take from this the skill to consider as many what-ifs as possible instead of only the expected outcome.

Never let something so flimsy as a locked door to the computer room stand in the way of an auditor on the warpath

Auditors aren’t the enemy here. You know who is?

The manager who wants to work from home but can’t because of security protocols. So he complains to the ceo who unilaterally decides punching holes in said security is ok because the manager is a nice guy.

It’s the accountant who doesn’t read her emails properly and tries to wire a large sum of cash to the ceo who sent a poorly worded request from an unusual address.

Its the CS team who work late at night and prop doors open for each other with bricks so they can sneak out at 4am and have a smoke.

It’s the guy who tapes his passwords to his screen and needs other passwords reset daily.

It’s the facility manager who prints out secure WiFi settings and posts it every 5 feet.

Auditors are nothing.

iOS 13 leaks suggest Apple is finally about to unleash the iPad as a computer for grownups

Please don’t advocate giving the peasants access to the file system. Or improved shells. Apple devices work as well as they do because you can’t break them so easily just by fat-fingering a freaking /etc/ text file. Imagine the idiots who will delete / because of the mess, or because some tard on YouTube said it’s a way to free up space.

Do you really want your friends and family to call you at 3am because they farked their phones loading the newest flash version with pornhub pre-installed?

Who's using 2FA? Sweet FA. Less than 10% of Gmail users enable two-factor authentication

Re: Of course they don't use it

It sounds like you're arguing against the need for pool safety fences around pools.

Google Chrome ad-blocking to begin in February – but what is it going to block?

30 days grace for crappy ads sounds highly exploitable

Facebook: Who needs millennials? The cops love us more than ever!

Hard to see how it would chase people away, with its forcing a stupid timeline structure on us, telling us we want to be friends with people 7degrees of Bacon away from our actual friends, the massive amount of ads scattered everywhere, the required separate apps for separate functions with stupid update notes that don't say anything... yeah it's a real mystery why people are moving away...

It's Patch Blues-day: Bad October Windows updates trigger BSODs

Love that it's the sysadmin's fault for the cockup and not because Microsoft laid out some poor planning...

Apple's iOS password prompts prime punters for phishing: Too easy now for apps to swipe secrets, dev warns

Different keyboards?

We already get prompted with different keyboards from within apps. With the system already non-uniform I don't see how this will improve anything

Support team discovers 'official' vendor paper doesn't rob you blind

The story was an anecdote from some trainers... It may not have even been real.

Vibrating walls shafted servers at a time the SUN couldn't shine

I don't get how elevators shunting a dozen people at a time are easier to deal with than elevators shunting a few garbage bags full of coffee cups and snot rags.

What's that, Equifax? Most people expect to be notified of a breach within hours?

Sounds like a case of "do as I say, not as I do"

Las Vegas locks down ahead of DEF CON hacking conference

I would trust an email before trusting an unknown USB device from some smooth-talking fedora.

Bloke takes over every .io domain by snapping up crucial name servers

He should have offered the domains to HoTMaiL.

Sysadmin bloodied by icicle that overheated airport data centre

Re: Frozen winter shit.

There is an I in team, it's right there in the A-hole (font permitting)

Startup remotely 'bricks' grumpy bloke's IoT car garage door – then hits reverse gear

It is humourous we are lambasting "the cloud"... while using a tool hosted on another person's cluster...

Microsoft cloud TITSUP: Skype, Outlook, Xbox, OneDrive, Hotmail down

There goes the migration from google I was about to explore...

Facebook investors yell at CEO: Get the Zuck out of our boardroom!

The last thing you want to do is show Zuckerberg you know how to kick him out of his company.

Who do you want to be Who? VOTE for the BBC's next Time Lord

Lets give Tom Baker another run at it. After all, who knows?

WTF? Francis Ford Coppola crowdsources Apocalypse Now game

There's a reason the big publishers won't touch his game - and it's not what he says it is. You'll be amazed.