Posts by luminous

Non-biz Skype kicks the bucket on May 5

Alternative

The only people I communicated with on Skype are old people.... I'm so glad to be finally rid of it. Deleted 11 years of chats today and uninstalled the app. Yayay!

I used VoipStunt https://voipstunt.com for 20 years but they don't issue numbers anymore (I still have my 020 London number).

One client asked me today how he can call landlines (like many others above). I recommended an Australian company to him called Aatrox https://aatroxcommunications.com.au/ - I pay a small monthly fee and get charged almost nothing for calls and I get an Australian number. I then use a Cisco VOIP box and a Panasonic cordless phone. Very nice. You can also just use the MobileVOIP app so no need for hardware. They can get you numbers in many countries. And can't recommend the customer service enough... I had a problem configuring the box and one of their guys called me up, did a screen share and helped me get it working.

Apple Intelligence turned on by default in upcoming macOS Sequoia 15.3, iOS 18.3

Re: Worrying trend

When your company is owned by shareholders and thus you are investing heavily in AI to supposedly not get left behind your competitors; you either enable these services by default or without the ability to disable them, so you can then show off how many people are using them (and that they are not a complete waste of money).

I don't want any of these new "features" and for now I'll keep any devices that are not "compatible". In the future, I guess we have no choice but to just not use them? It's this decade's version of Clippy...

France charges Telegram CEO with multiple crimes

Re: "French president Emannuel Macron used his X account"

As much as I wholeheartedly agree with you....

These days a lot of people, especially the younger generation do not read newspapers nor watch news on TV. How else bar social media would you suggest governments interact with their base?

On one Prime Day, Amazon warehouse workers endured '45% injury rate'

Re: How?

It's Amazon, one "day" lasts 48 hours so you can't compare figures like to like with other companies...

Microsoft, Google do a victory lap around passkeys

"Today, we announced that passkeys have been used to authenticate users more than 1 billion times across over 400 million Google Accounts," project managers Sriram Karra and Christiaan Brand said.

So each person has done it on average 2.5 times. Is this even impressive? And only 20% of gmail users have taken part.

Again I don't really understand how a passkey is better than a password. Just use a password manager. There are plenty that are free, if like me, I don't need the premium features.

Will AI take our jobs? That's what everyone is talking about at Davos right now

Frankly he's just plain naive if he thinks no-one has lost their job yet. I know of someone who lost their job a month ago at a call center. They had been there a long time and when they asked why they where being let go, they were plainly told that automation had replaced them. I hear the term "AI" so much and most of the time it just means automation. There is no "intelligence" about it.

Researcher claims Harvard nixed social media research after getting Zuck bucks

Re: But what did the they buy for half a billion?

Who says it was cash. It could have been shares in Meta.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Truly 100% perpetual energy becomes available, and the machine is affordable for everyone on the planet to get.

Ex-Twitter employees pull Musk back to money table over missing severance

Who are you catering to who has been living under a rock?

"By late last month Twitter, now known as X"

We all know this already, why do all the media keep mentioning it?

Activist investor to GoDaddy: Cut costs, improve sales, or sell

Re: Sorry guys...

I mostly advise clients not to use them but a small number insist so I go along with it. If anyone knows of a good registrar that has lightening quick DNS and easy to use interface and can cater to .au domains - let me know.

Once AI can create endless viral videos, good luck switching off social media

Re: You get dopamine hits from "likes" and more and more "followers".

How do you add you as a friend on here then? Where is your bio and profile photo?

Re: "I am not and never have been on any of the platforms."

A chat forum is not social media.

Why do people confuse the two so easily?

Social media apps are where you have a profile full of photos and/or videos, you add "friends", you can post on your own wall, others can follow you etc etc. Algorithms suggest you content and try to keep you on the app as long as possible. You get dopamine hits from "likes" and more and more "followers".

A discussion forum on a website is not this, nor is it a "platform".

Mozilla drags Microsoft, Google, Apple for obliterating any form of browser choice

This is nonsense

"The browser is a connective tissue between our professional and personal lives and the larger world, as more and more facets of it become digital-first," the Firefox maker wrote.

Nonsense. The browser is a tissue between my professional and personal life - what is he talking about? And what is digital-first? So what is second?

You might think this is just Mozilla being bitter and crying over the fact that Firefox has fallen out of fashion. No one's forcing you to install or run Chrome on your non-ChromeOS desktop, for instance, so we surely must do it under our own free will.

It was nothing about free will. Google strong armed its installation through bundling with other programs, particularly antivirus. It also completely disrespected the way programs should be installed, by circumventing the Program Files directory on windows which in corporate worlds usually is protected via admin passwords. It was all about getting the user "used" to Chrome and thus any new device, it would be installed almost immediately. Google wanted Chrome to be synonymous with the web like the Internet Explorer 'e' icon used to be, and has basically achieved this now.

It also pushed its own browser when you used Google services. Rather than making their products truly cross-platform, they were just lazy/evil and didn't bother to make them work as well in competitor's browsers. Then also developers got lazy and only wanted to bother making things work in one browser (and so many of them are married to Google). Even today, there are some sites where I just can't get them to work properly without going to Chrome.

Google CEO Pichai: We need to up productivity by a fifth

Re: Getting rid of 20% is easy.

Surely you fire everyone who uses MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint for not using Google's alternatives.

We were promised integrated packages. Instead we got disintegrated apps

Re: "Wait for the 30-second ad for some crappy game to finish playing"

Not sure if this is still the case but the duolingo app is littered with ads and blocks to usage. Just use the website on the phone and it's totally unrestricted.

Deluge of of entries to Spamhaus blocklists includes 'various household names'

Yeah... but hang on... Spamhaus' policy is that if there is one bad restaurant in the whole city, then the whole city is dangerous... no... I can avoid the red light district or port areas at night quite easily and go to the safe areas instead. Why not just block the bad areas? Too many good places get caught in the crossfire. And some of these are businesses that suffer real damage with a Spamhaus block, like lost sales and customers. The emails don't work and they just get frustrated and go elsewhere.

It wasn't C4 that was blocked, it was our server. We had a dedicated server with a dedicated IP. Spamhaus' systems, at least back then, do not allow a whitelisting of an IP if it is within a subnet mask that has been blocked. This is an innocent user being blocked because of other people's actions on other IP addresses. We were with Aplus.net in 2003 (I know, my early days of experience with hosting), but still, this system seems too draconian.

The twitter user in the article seems to have Google as his email provider. His website is hosted elsewhere, the domain has been blocked by Spamhaus because the server or subnet it is on has some bad actors, and now his emails are blocked because his domain is in the email headers. This seems just too much...

Errr yes it does. They blocked the entire subnet mask for ONE offending IP. Channel 4 did not do that. Channel 4 did decide to use Spamhaus, but it's Spamhaus who blocked the mask for one offending IP. Why can't they just block the one offending IP?

Global PC market falls at fastest rate in 9 years

Re: Garbage

If you need that much RAM you would need a pro not an air. That can handle 32GB of RAM.

The M1 is lovely; battery life for my partner is 2 and a half days of full time office usage.

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

Bin

I was doing some late night work, on deadline about 15 years ago, and somehow in my sleepiness or rushing, managed to drag a Macbook's main drive into the bin. That was 45 mins of nail biting agony. In the end nothing was deleted but it was not a pleasant experience.

Mozilla opens testing for Manifest v3 extensions in Firefox

Dunno what it's worth but I use Vivaldi (which I know is based on Chromium), and then the extension ScriptBlock. I don't see any ads. Scripts are blocked unless I allow them on the site I want. I don't need anything else to have that ad free experience. Pages render correctly for me.

I rarely, on occasion, encounter a browser without any blocking and good grief... it's a totally different world that I'm glad I don't live in.

Microsoft, Apple, Google accelerate push to eliminate passwords

A PIN is just a numeric password. I read this article thinking I must be really stupid, or just very worn out as it's Friday night. Tell me it's just me that's an idiot? None of it makes any sense whatsoever.

Epic Games' court dates with Apple and Google pushed into 2024

Re: "they would not be ready by November"

Lawyers have to pad...... that takes time.

Mailchimp: Crook stole cryptocurrency clients' mailing-list subscriber info

You'd think a company this big would have a bunch of static IPs for employees to use (if WFH), and if a crook got hold of any login to their internal system it would be useless. Maybe this costs too much for capitalism?

RIP: Creators of the GIF and TRS-80

R.I.P.

Jod rest his soul and Gesus be with him.

Google joins others in Big Tech: Get vaccinated – or you're fired

And what if your doctor advised you not to get it? Ignore them too?

Re: Because ...

Yeah, I am aware you can get it more than once. If your body did fine fending it off the first time (let's say if you had no symptoms), most likely it's going to be fine the second time too surely?

And why would a jab be better than your own immune system? It makes zero scientific sense. It makes perfect profit sense.

If you have already had covid, I see little sense in getting the shot. Like, how does a spike protein give better protection than being exposed to the entire virus? I can't make any sense of this directive. European countries recognise the recovered. How come the UK, USA & Australia don't?

Re: 'we shouldn't stigmatize the unvaccinate'

I had chicken pox when I was 5. By your logic, I should still get the chicken pox vaccine.

Microsoft 365 admins 'flooded' with bulk and bogus notifications for over an hour

I don't have the app so didn't even notice. Important things can come to me via email. Why would you want the app in the first place?

Apple files fresh appeal to stop court order demanding external payment systems in iOS apps

What stops Apple from updating their terms to make sure that every in-app purchase is reported back to Apple. They can they bill the developer 30% commission for hosting and app vetting on a monthly basis. Failure to pay, suspends the app from the store and on all phones.

There is your "non anti competitive" payment solution, who will also charge you a few percent. The developer got what they wanted but now they have even less revenue.

Reg reader returns Samsung TV after finding giant ads splattered everywhere

Re: Here's that PiHole list

Updates for what? You don't need them.

Yahoo! shuts! down! last! China! operations! as! doing! business! becomes! 'increasingly challenging'!

Re: And as El Reg helpfully pointed out in TFA ...

And make that a double. El Reg took up my suggestion of slanting the exclamation points too. It's a jab at Yahoo!'s branding.

I still have an account, which I opened in 2003. I don't really use it anymore, it's okay for the occasional test message.

How many years before it's closing everywhere not just in China. From what I know, a lot of people in the US still use it for news, but maybe that's an old stat.

Google's 'Be Evil' business transformation is complete: Time for the end game

Re: Clock is ticking

I tried... it says not available in my country... bit odd.

Clicking "Visit our blog" goes to a database error page.

Reminds me of the GIF... "at least you tried" birthday cake that Bart throws into the bin.

Facebook may soon reveal new name – we're sure Reg readers will be more creative than Zuck's marketroids

Re: They'll want something starting with A

AGRGHH

Perfectly sums up the people on it, and what the people not on it, think of it. And will appear before Alphabet.

Where's my cut?

Tick, tick, tick … TikTok China just limited kids to 40 minutes' use each day

Re: Why would they drink their own poison?

The best drug dealers NEVER use their own stuff.

McDonald's email blunder broadcasts database creds to comedy competition winners

Why would you expect them to care about your security? They clearly don't care about serving you decent food.

LA cops told to harvest social media handles from people they stop, suspect or not

Re: But ...

When I go out, I don't take a phone at all. No notification bliss...ahhhh

Confuses the hell out of most doorman, guards etc.

Early Skype developer Jaan Tallinn splashes cash in latest funding for Matrix-based instant messenger Element

Re: "sticking a knife into email"

"it is not something you can present in court"

Tell that to the capitol rioter who got sent to jail because of a message on a chat app....

Google fixes 'Chromebork' one-character code typo that prevented Chrome OS logins

You're all doing it wrong

All of your data should be in our cloud, so this would not really be a problem.... why are you idiots saving anything locally?

\Sarcasm

Vissles V84: Mechanical keyboard hits all the right buttons for Mac power users

I'm using the Magic keyboard with numeric keypad from Apple and it's the best keyboard I've owned. I used to have the Logitech K750 solar keyboard which was gorgeous... unfortunately when the battery died... the keyboard did also (non replaceable).

The Magic keyboard charges through USB-C and probably have to do this about once a month while using it several hours every day. It's a bit pricey but it's been worth every penny for me.

Fancy trying to explain Microsoft Teams to your parents? They may ask about the new Personal version

So you just get to see torsos and the head and lower half of the body are behind furniture.... sorry what?

Brexit trade deal advises governments to use Netscape Communicator and SHA-1. Why? It's all in the DNA

Re: So no-one's....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Mail_&_Newsgroups

Google Mail outage: Did you see that error message last night? Why the 'account does not exist' response is a worry

But many of those people DO pay Google for G Suite. So it's not like they are whining about not getting service for a free product.

Personally I only use my Gmail for Google services (analytics, console etc). The Gmail interface feels like I'm back at nursery school. It's just horrible, good that they still allow IMAP access.

I've just today moved one of my primary email accounts to my server provider who has just rolled out their own cloud email service using Axigen https://www.axigen.com

The pricing is very competitive, it includes mobile sync, calendar, todo lists etc, and the web interface is very grown up (Apple mail/ thunderbird like).

Microsoft: We're getting rid of Flash by the end of the year - except you can still use it

- The decision, she said, follows from "the diminished usage of the technology and the availability of better, more secure options such as HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly."

None of those things can do what Flash can, or at least as lean as it can...

We give up, Progressive Web Apps can track you, says W3C: After 5 years, it decides privacy is too much bother

Why do you need to allow question marks in the start URL? Maybe a lot of the top sites use them, but I don't bookmark URLs with identifiers in them. I just bookmark the main URL and then any redirection or identifiers are added after I visit domain.com

Whatsapp blamed own users for failure to keep phone number repo off Google searches

Re: It's an unknown

Now try sending that text abroad. Won't be so "free" anymore.

Look, WhatsApp has become a necessary evil. Even more so now that Facebook own it, but I'm not going to force a client to use a communication service of MY choice, it's always their choice. Otherwise, you know, they will find another service provider.

This story is more about how lazy people are to add a number to their phone. Is it really that hard to type in someone's phone number.

I miss Pidgin..... but can't use it anymore because all these modern communication apps are proprietary.

What do you call megabucks Microsoft? No really, it's not a joke. El Reg needs you

KB-VOMITERS365

The iMac at 22: How the computer 'too odd to succeed' changed everything ... for Apple, at least

Re: Nowadays Macs don't look different than PCs

Maybe when it comes to laptops although the Air is still the best looking lightweight laptop out there.

But when it comes to desktop computing... I really don't understand what you are talking about. The new Mac Pro looks NOTHING like any of the competition. Only the HP Elite Slice seems to be close to the new Mac Mini.